Distributed data acquisition and storage architecture for the SuperNova Acceleration Probe

The SuperNova acceleration probe (SNAP) instrument is being designed to collect image and spectroscopic data for the study of dark energy in the universe. This paper describes a distributed architecture for the data acquisition system which interfaces to visible light and infrared imaging detectors. The architecture includes the use of NAND flash memory for the storage of exposures in a file system. Also described is an FPGA-based lossless data compression algorithm with a configurable pre-scaler based on a novel square root data compression method to improve compression performance. The required interactions of the distributed elements with an instrument control unit will be described as well.