The Dark Energy Survey (DES) project is a major step forward in probing the physical origin of cosmic acceleration and the nature of dark energy. It consists of two pieces: a deep, multi-band map covering 5000 square degrees, and a "cosmic movie" of a thirty square-degree region obtained by revisiting that area at least once every six nights. The wide-area survey will measure positions, shapes, fluxes, and approximate (photometric) redshifts for around 300 million galaxies, and the time-domain survey will discover and measure light curves for several thousand supernovae and other transients. Data will be collected during five annual, six-month observing seasons, beginning in September 2012, with the Dark Energy Camera (DECam), a new wide-field, facility instrument built by the DES collaboration that will be installed in late 2011 at the prime focus of the Blanco 4-meter telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile.
The raw survey data must be processed efficiently into scientifically useful products that are served to the DES collaboration to enable the science goals. With previous NSF support, the project has constructed the Dark Energy Survey Data Management (DESDM) system so as to meet the DES Science Requirements. This system will be finished and operated as part of carrying out the DES. The work will be done mainly at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, with important contributions from the University of Pennsylvania and from the Institut d'Astrophysique in Paris. This award supports the major operational expense, that of the personnel, with small hardware costs for storage and database needs. The core processing will be mainly carried out using Grid resources supported separately by NSF. A small amount of funding is also provided to help with project coordination at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.
DES data will be made public, providing a rich legacy that will enable numerous archival research projects in astronomy that can confidently be predicted to go far beyond the scientific goals of the DES. Such confidence is merited by noting the high impact and broad community use of an earlier survey, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), and realizing that the DES data will be substantially deeper, have higher angular resolution, and extend to longer wavelengths than the SDSS imaging. The DESDM data products will be "science-ready," with high-precision photometric and astrometric calibrations, and will include single-epoch and co-added images and derived object catalogs, all served from an easily accessible database compliant with international virtual observatory standards.
Information about the many thousands of transients expected to be found by the time-domain survey will be made public immediately, to enable follow-up by other researchers. The availability and quality of the DES data will also impact the public understanding of research, and the DESDM team itself will be working with a local program for middle-school girls and with the Adler Planetarium, among others, to pursue these education and outreach possibilities.
