In the Dark

I’m a bit fragile today. I don’t know why, but it may be connected with our Departmental Christmas partylast night. I’m glad I didn’t have too much to drink. Ahem.

Anyway, in my current condition I only have time for a short post to pass on the news that I today saw official confirmation that, negotiations having been successfully completed, the European Space Agency’s Euclid mission will indeed be launched by SpaceX, on a Falcon 9 rocket.

Various working meetings have been scheduled to start next week between ESA, SpaceX and Thales Alenia Space – Italia (TAS-I, who constructed the vehicle). The launch period is confirmed to be somewhere in the 3rd Quarter of 2023 and may even be as early as 1st July 2023. The actual launch window of one month will be agreed on the 1st of February.

Now there will be intense activity preparing the Euclid vehicle for launch as well as readying the Ground Segment – the bit that collects and processes the data.

The 2023 Annual Euclid Consortium Meeting, scheduled to be in Copenhagen in from 19th to 23rd June will be the last such meeting before the launch. I am very much looking forward to attending it.

This entry was posted on December 15, 2022 at 3:53 pm and is filed under Biographical, The Universe and Stuff with tags Euclid, Euclid Consortium, Falcon 9, SpaceX. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.