Speaker
Megan Splettstoesser
Description
The Dark Energy Survey (DES) is a five year (with half-year extension approved) ground-based optical and near-infrared survey covering ~5,000 square degrees (~12%) of the sky. The DES international collaboration is comprised of several hundred members working toward understanding dark energy and cosmic acceleration. In this talk, I will begin with an overview of several DES working groups and briefly describe their science goals. Next, I will focus on a specific DES endeavour: Balrog, an image simulation tool. I will present Balrog products and discuss Balrog’s potential to characterize measurement biases in the DES Data Management system. Developing an understanding of measurement biases will allow all the DES working groups to utilize a greater fraction of DES data.