This morning I flew from London Gatwick to Edinburgh to attend the UK Euclid meeting at the Royal Observatory, which lasts today and tomorrow. It turns out there were two other astronomers on the plane: Alan Heavens from Imperial and Jon Loveday from my own institution, the University of Sussex.
The meeting is very useful for me as it involves a number of updates on the European Space Agency’s Euclid mission. For those of you who don’t know about Euclid here’s what it says on the tin:
Euclid is an ESA mission to map the geometry of the dark Universe. The mission will investigate the distance-redshift relationship and the evolution of cosmic structures by measuring shapes and redshifts of galaxies and clusters of galaxies out to redshifts ~2, or equivalently to a look-back time of 10 billion years. In this way, Euclid will cover the entire period over which dark energy played a significant role in accelerating the expansion
Here’s an artist’s impression of the satellite:
Do give you an idea of what an ambitious mission this is, it basically involves repeated imaging of a large fraction of the sky (~15,000 square degrees) over a period of about six years. Each image is so large that it would take 300 HD TV screens to display it at full resolution. The data challenge is considerable, and the signals Euclid is trying to measure are so small that observational systematics have to be controlled with exquisite precision. The requirements are extremely stringent, and there are many challenges to confront, but it’s going well so far. Oh, and there are about 1,200 people working on it!
Coincidentally, this very morning ESA issued a press release announcing that Euclid has passed its PDR (Preliminary Design Review) and is on track for launch in December 2020. I wouldn’t bet against that date slipping, however, as there is a great deal of work still to do and a number of things that could go wrong and cause delays. Nevertheless, so far so good!
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In the Dark 