Overview of the Nearby Supernova Factory

The Nearby Supernova Factory (SNfactory) is an international experiment designed to lay the foundation for the next generation of cosmology experiments (such as CFHTLS, wP, SNAP and LSST) which will measure the expansion history of the Universe using Type la supernovae. The SNfactory will discover and obtain frequent lightcurve spectrophotometry covering 3200-10000Angstrom for roughly 300 Type Ia supernovae at the low-redshift end of the smooth Hubble flow. The quantity, quality, breadth of galactic environments, and homogeneous nature of the SNfactory dataset will make it the premier source of calibration for the Type Ia supernova width-brightness relation. and the intrinsic supernova colors used for K-correction and correction for extinction by host-galaxy dust. This dataset will also allow an extensive investigation of additional parameters which possibly influence the quality of Type la supernovae as cosmological probes. The SNfactory search capabilities and follow-up instrumentation include wide-field CCD imagers on two 1.2-m telescopes (via collaboration with the Near Earth Asteroid Tracking team at JPL and the QUEST team at Yale), and a two-channel integral-field-unit optical spectrograph/imager being fabricated for the University of Hawaii 2.2-m telescope. In addition to ground-based follow-up, UV spectra for a subsample of these supernovae will be obtained with HST. The pipeline to obtain, transfer via wireless and standard internet, and automatically process the search images is in operation. Software and hardware development is now underway to enable the execution of follow-up spectroscopy of supernova candidates at the Hawaii 2.2-m telescope via automated remote control of the telescope and the IFU spectrograph/imager.