As the time for our camera’s first light approaches, workload and excitement increase exponentially among the Dark Energy Survey collaborators and it is about time we start sharing the latter. Beginning today, you will find here at Quantum Diaries an insider’s account of our fast progress, frequently updated as we countdown to first light.
So, here we go. If you haven’t heard of us yet, DES is an experiment designed to investigate dark energy, one of the most trending topics of the last 30 years, featured among the top priorities in the world-wide scientific agenda despite a recent funding blow up. DES will image an area of 5,000-square degrees (nearly 1/8 of the sky) using five optical-bands, obtaining detailed measurements of about 300 million galaxies. With this data we can shed light on the mystery of cosmic acceleration by analyzing four complementary probes: supernovae, baryonic acoustic oscillations, galaxy clusters and weak lensing.
DES will use its own powerful new instrument, the Dark Energy Camera, or DECam, which is under construction at Fermilab. Building an entirely new system to answer a specific question is a growing trend in astrophysics, probably a consequence of developing close ties with the field of high energy physics.
This 570-megapixel, giant camera is being tested on a telescope simulator (the yellow and red rings that you see in the video) until the end of this month. As a Fermilab postdoc, I am heavily involved in these tests, together with a team that keeps up the fast pace even during the blizzard last week.
Check out this time-lapse video of the DECam construction:
We are now getting ready for a simulated observing run, a comprehensive integration test of the full system. We will use a star projector to simulate the sky and the goal is to take one night’s worth of data. The atmosphere here at the lab is of stress and excitement as this is our last test of the full system before we bring DECam down from the telescope simulator. The results of this test will be very important to guiding us through the next steps.
So here is where we stand nine months before first light. Stay tuned for more updates here or follow us on Facebook. Leave a message in the comments if you want to know more or would like to visit us while the camera is still up on the simulator.
–Marcelle Soares-Santos
Tags: Cosmic Frontier, dark energy, Dark Energy Camera, Dark Energy Survey, DECam, DES, expansion of the universe, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory
