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The Dark Energy Survey (DES) was designed to probe the origin of the accelerating universe and help uncover the nature of dark energy by measuring the 14 billion-year history of cosmic expansion with high precision. More than 120 scientists from 23 institutions in the U.S., Spain, the United Kingdom, Brazil and Germany are working on the project.
This collaboration is building an extremely sensitive, 570-megapixel digital camera, DECam, and will mount it on the Blanco 4-meter telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory high in the Chilean Andes. Starting in September 2012, and continuing for five years, DES will survey a large swath of the southern sky out to vast distances in order to provide new clues to this most fundamental of questions.Image credit: National Center for Supercomputer Applications
