Dark Energy Survey

Donald Petravick, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Usage Details

Gregory Daues, Michelle Gower, Donald Petravick, Michael Johnson, Felipe Menanteau, Eric Morganson, Xinyang Lu, Yu-Ching Chen, Ricardo Ogando

The Dark Energy Survey (DES) is an international, collaborative effort to map hundreds of millions of galaxies, detect thousands of supernovae, and find patterns of cosmic structure that will reveal the nature of the mysterious dark energy that is accelerating the expansion of our Universe. DES began searching the Southern skies on August 31, 2013. DES uses the new 3 square-degree CCD camera, installed at the prime focus of on the Blanco 4-m. During a normal night of observations, DES produces about 1 TB of raw data, including science and calibration images, which are transported automatically from Chile to NCSA in Urbana, Illinois to be archived and reduced. The DES data management system is in charge of the processing, calibration and archiving of these data, which has been developed by collaborating DES institutions and led by NCSA. All data are available to a scientific collaboration of over 400 members in the United States, Europe and South America.