Flaugher

Overview of the Dark Energy Survey
Brenna Flaugher (Fermilab)

The Dark Energy Survey (DES) is designed to take the next step in the understanding of the mystery of dark energy with a deep, near infrared survey of 5000 sq. deg of the Southern Galactic Cap using a new 500M pixel CCD camera on the 4m Blanco telescope at CTIO. The DES collaboration consists of institutions from the US (Fermilab, Chicago, UIUC, LBNL, CTIO, Penn, Michigan, OSU), the UK (UCL, Portsmouth, Cambridge, Edinburgh and Sussex), Brazil, Spain. In the language of the Dark Energy Task Force, DES is a stage III project and will use four complementary techniques: galaxy cluster counts, weak lensing, angular power spectrum and type Ia supernovae to improve the DETF figure of merit by a factor of 4-5. I will present an overview of the DES instrument (DECam) which will be mounted at the prime focus of the Blanco 4m telescope. DECam includes a focal plane of 62 2kx4k CCDs, a five element optical corrector, five filters (g,r,i,z,Y), and the associated infrastructure for operation in a new prime focus cage. To reach redshifts of ~1, we use the 250 micron thick fully-depleted CCDs that have been developed at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) and assembled into four-side buttable modules at Fermilab. DECam will be devoted to the DES for 525 nights over the five year survey (2011-2016) and will otherwise be available to the community as an NOAO facility instrument. The current status of the project will be described.