Probing Dark Energy in the Accelerating Universe with SNAP

Abstract

It has now been firmly established that the Universe is expanding at an accelerated rate, driven by a presently unknown form of dark energy that appears to dominate our Universe today. A dedicated satellite mission has been designed to precisely map out the cosmological expansion history of the Universe and thereby determine the properties of the dark energy. The SuperNova/Acceleration Probe (SNAP) will study thousands of distant supernovae, each with unprecedented precision, using a 2-meter aperture telescope with a wide field, large-area optical-to-near-IR imager and high-throughput spectrograph. SNAP can not only determine the amount of dark energy with high precision, but test the nature of the dark energy by examining how its equation of state evolves. The images produced by SNAP will have an unprecedented combination of depth, solid-angle, angular resolution, and temporal sampling and will provide a rich program of auxiliary science.