It’s a lovely sunny Saint Ash Valentine’s Wednesday Day in Australia though I’m not sure what day it is at the 2nd Lagrange Point of the Earth-Sun system. Nevertheless, as I mentioned last week, Euclid’s Wide Survey starts today; here is the official announcement of this from ESA. To mark this momentous event here is another nice video update showing the preparations that have been going on ahead of the arrival of the deluge of real data:
Among other things, you will see an appearance by Henry Joy McCracken whose namesake led the United Irishmen in the Rebellion of 1798.
I just heard some excellent news about Euclid so thought I would post a quick update here. I won’t say much because there will no doubt be official communications from the European Space Agency and the Euclid Consortium. You can find a variety of Euclid-related posts on this blog here.
Over the past few months, there has been a huge amount of activity relating to commissioning the instruments, verifying their performance, and measuring parameters of the optical system that will be needed for analysis of the huge amount of data due to come from Euclid. All this effort fed into the Mission Commissioning Results Review (MCRR) which concluded yesterday that all was well.
This is an important milestone for Euclid because, in ESA parlance, it marks the change from a project to a mission. Until commissioning, there is a project manager who works with ESA and the industrial contractors to ensure everything functions properly; when nominal operations start the project team is disbanded and the mission team takes over; and so it came to pass that the Project Manager (Giuseppe Racca) handed over the reins to the Mission Manager (Pierre Ferruit).
That’s when the role of the Euclid Consortium increases substantially. In particular the Science Ground Segment (SGS), which includes the pipelines that will process the data, has been declared to be ready for business. You can read more about the SGS here but here’s a graphic that shows how data comes from the telescope, external telescopes, or simulations, then run through their respective pipelines for VIS, NISP, or external data, then are merged into a coherent format. Pipelines then extract scientific information and compute science data products for further analysis
Each element of this diagram is rather complex. Here, for example, is the organization of the Science Data Centre (SDC) component of the Science Ground Segment at the bottom of the above picture, consisting of computing centers responsible for implementing and running the data processing pipelines:
Anyway, the immediate upshot of all this is that full surveying activities of Euclid can now proceed. The Euclid mission will conduct primarily two different surveys: a “Wide Survey”, covering about 15,000 square degrees on the sky, and a “Deep Survey” of about 50 square degrees, where the instruments will observe three fields much longer than the rest of the sky to capture much fainter galaxies and hence look further out into space. I understand that the Wide Survey will commence in earnest on 14th February.The timescale from now is that the first full set of survey data (DR1) will be available internally to the Euclid Consortium in May or June 2025 and will be made public a year later (i.e. by June 2026).
That doesn’t mean that Euclid will be silent until 2026. In fact, the first batch of post-launch papers will come out very soon, in May 2024. This will include science papers resulting from the Early Release Observations – the data from these will also be made public at the same time – as well as an overview paper for the whole mission and papers describing the details of NISP and VIS instruments using measurements made during commissioning. There will also be a release in May 2025 of data from the Deep Survey patch of about 50 square degrees.
A few months ago, I blogged on the occasion of the launch by Simon Harris TD, Minister for Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science, of the Little Book of Irish Research. This book, which is aimed at school students, so is written at an elementary level, gives quick summaries of areas of research that the general public said that they were interested in, grouped into sixteen themes, and it will be distributed to schools all round Ireland.
if you want to read it here is a PDF file of the whole thing for you to download at your leisure. When I posted about it last time I hadn’t actually seen a hard copy, but I finally got my hands on one:
I can now confirm that it is indeed a little book. I think we’ll find it useful for our own outreach events, open days, etc, in the Department of Theoretical Physics, and so will the many colleagues in other Departments in other universities and research institutes whose work is also featured.
I was very gratified to see myself get a mention (on page 41), though it’s not really about me but about Euclid which has generated considerable interest in the general public already and is set to continue doing that for many years. As you can see, there’s also a double-page spread of JWST, though unfortunately it does not name the scientists involved; Paddy Kavanagh is the main man at Maynooth for matters JWST.
I have now entered that strange twilight zone between Christmas and New Year during which it is difficult to remember which day is which, so I thought I’d just do a quick retrospective about the thing that has the biggest effect on my professional life in 2023, namely the Euclid satellite.
Euclid was launched halfway through the year, on July 1st, an event that took place just a week after or so after the annual Euclid Consortium Meeting in Copenhagen when I took over as Chair of the Euclid Consortium Diversity Committee. The latter led to a huge increase in the number of telecons I had to attend, not only the ECDC’s own bi-weekly Zoom meetings but also various other committees that the ECDC Chair attends ex officio. Much of the Chair’s work is confidential, which means there is no-one to consult with about the difficult matters. Had I not been on sabbatical since September I don’t think I would have had either the time or the energy to carry out these duties. It has taken me quite a while to get the hang of this role, but I do feel that it’s important and that I have contributed in a small way to the Euclid Consortium.
As for the scientific side of Euclid, after a few technical issues the commissioning of Euclid’s instruments is now more-or-less over and the final preparations are being made for the survey proper, which will take commence in the New Year. What is going on now is called a phase diversity analysis, which is being used to verify and improve the performance of the optical system.
In November, a set of Early Release Observations were published. Early in the New Year a number of scientific papers about these will be published, along with other papers about Euclid in general, including an overview paper that provides a high-level description of the mission. Data relating to the Early Release Observations will also be released to the general public.
After that the survey will begin in earnest. The full exercise will take six years to complete – I’ll have retired before it finishes – but there will be a first data release (DR1) using one year’s worth of survey data. That should give a good idea of how well it’s all going to work out for the full survey. That data will be made available to the public.
If all goes to plan, after the annual EC meeting (which next year will be in Rome, from 17th to 21st June), I’ll be stepping down as ECDC Chair and indeed from the ECDC altogether. That is just as well because my sabbatical will be over at the end of August and I’ll be back to a full teaching and admin load at Maynooth, assuming there’s still a Department to return to!
Yesterday I gave a talk at the UK Euclid Consortium (EC) Meeting in London in my role as Chair of the ECDC (Euclid Consortium Diversity Committee). I didn’t actually go to London, but delivered my talk virtually (not without a few hiccups, but I won’t go into that). My presentation was just a short one, outlining some of the things the ECDC does and encouraging others to get involved. One of the matters arising was the EC Code of Conduct, which has recently been updated. This document covers work within the EC generally, as well as specific rules governing EC-sponsored events, such as the meeting I spoke at. Incidentally, one of the latter rules is that organizers should facilitate virtual attendance at meetings, which they clearly did for me yesterday!
Coincidentally, there was a news item in Nature today that reminded me of a post on this blog from a couple of years ago. That was when news first broke of a bullying scandal at the University of Lund, specifically in the historic Lund Observatory, home of the Astronomy Department. Two professors were involved, Sofia Feltzing and Melvyn Davies. As far as I understand the situation, both are still employed by the University, in the Department of Geology and the Department of Mathematics respectively.
The latest news from Lund is that in the aftermath of this scandal, the Astronomy Department has been closed and the staff previously in it subsumed into Physics. That’s a pretty drastic step. In my experience forced mergers of departments, though popular with autocratic managers, are usually counterproductive from the point of view of staff morale. Precisely what the closure of the Lund Observatory after 350 years is meant to achieve is beyond me, but I assume that the atmosphere there had become so toxic that the authorities couldn’t think of anything else to do.
This is a demonstration of something I’ve often said in talks about EDI work. When matters come to formal disciplinary process – if they ever do – the outcome is almost never satisfactory in any respect, not least because the outcomes are often concealed by Non-Disclosure Agreements. The only really hope of creating an inclusive workplace is to ensure that bullying and harassment don’t happen in the first place, or are snuffed out very early on. Early intervention, mediation and conflict resolution are far more likely to provide a successful outcome than formal processes. The problem is that junior members of a department, who are most likely to be the target of bullying, do not feel empowered to make a complaint until it’s too late.
A binding Code of Conduct is one thing, but in order to work it has to be able to be enforced. That is why I agree with the approach suggested by the 21 Group, namely that there should be independent investigators for such matters whose conclusions are binding.
Yesterday came across the above “infographic” – as I’m told such things are called – showing the media traffic generated by last month’s Early Release Observations from the ESA Euclid mission. Some quite interesting facts emerge from it. The new observations were released n 7th November, hence the big spike in the left hand panel on that date.
I see that about 31% of the activity was on Twitter, which I am no longer on, with a slightly smaller amount on Facebook. Overall, social media account for about 60% of the “reach”, with mainstream media (including print, online, and TV/Radio) languishing far behind. Blogs (presumably including this one) account for a mere 1%.
The breakdown by country is interesting too; the table shows only EAS member states. The UK is way out in front, no doubt because BBC News ran a major item on the day of the release. France, Germany, Italy and Spain all have major scientific involvements in Euclid and correspondingly active public engagement activities.
I was pleasantly surprised at the significant amount of interest in Ireland, given that some bigger countries with far greater scientific involvement in Euclid (e.g. Denmark and The Netherlands) generated so little. As the only member of the Euclid Consortium in Ireland I could try to pretend that this was all down to me, but I rather think it’s more likely to be a result of the fact that many Irish people read the UK media so some of the Irish traffic could be spillover from the big UK spike. Still, I think one can interpret this as meaning that the Public in the Republic have an appetite for news about space, something that we have certainly noticed when organizing events in Maynooth.
I thought I’d mention another nice thing. Here is one of the PR images produced by ESA about the early release observations. The point about Euclid is that to achieve its science goals it has to have extremely good optical quality across a very wide field of view. The systems are currently being tested and fine-tuned to see how good their performance actually is, but so far it’s looking good.
The main thing that caught my eye, however, is the collection of little flags along the bottom. How nice it is to see Ireland’s among them!
Yesterday, the last day of Science Week, saw the launch by Simon Harris TD, Minister for Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science, of the Little Book of Irish Research. This book, which is aimed at school students, so is written at an elementary level, gives quick summaries of areas of research that the general public said that they were interested in, grouped into sixteen themes, and it will be distributed to schools all round Ireland.
I was very gratified to see myself get a mention (on page 41), though it’s not really about me but about Euclid which has generated considerable interest in the general public already and is set to continue doing that for many years. As you can see, there’s also a double-page spread of JWST, though unfortunately it does not name the scientists involved; Paddy Kavanagh is the main man at Maynooth for matters JWST.
I understand The Little Book of Irish Research will be the focus of a social media campaign over coming weeks, which will hopefully make more people more aware of the research going on in all disciplines in Ireland. I think we’ll find it useful for our own outreach events, open days, etc, in the Department of Theoretical Physics, and so will the many colleagues in other Departments whose work is also featured.
I haven’t seen hard copies of the book yet, as I’m in Barcelona, but if you want to read it here is a PDF file of the whole thing for you to download at your leisure.
The Perseus Cluster (Abell 426) – a dense concentration of over a thousand galaxies with a total mass of about 1.2 × 1015 M⊙ – is impressive in its own right, especially because the picture was taken in a single exposure, but the staggering thing about this image is that it contains hundreds of thousands of galaxies. In other words there are as many galaxies in this picture as there are words in a book. Most of these galaxies are in the background, not associated with the cluster, and many of them extremely distant. With so many objects in one field, you can perhaps see how much data we will get from the entire survey, which will last more than 6 years. It is these distant sources – billions of them – that Euclid will survey to glean information about the expansion history of the Universe.
P.S. Yesterday’s press conference resulted in a lot of media attention worldwide, even some in Ireland. There is a piece on the RTÉ website, for example, and another on Silicon Republic (which includes a quote from yours truly).
So today’s the day. The first science-quality observations from Euclid have now been released to the public. The official press release is here, and the press conference showcasing the new observations can be viewed here:
The images themselves can be found in this repository. In summary they are (in no particular order):
IC 342NGC 6822Horsehead NebulaNGC 6397Perseus Cluster
And here they are – you can click on them to make them bigger:
A few points of my own.
First, it is important to realise that these observations are not part of the full Euclid survey, which will start in early 2024, but were produced during the process of verification the capabilities of the telescope and detectors. They are all very short exposures, taking up less than a day to make all the images, but they demonstrate that Euclid is performing very well indeed!
Euclid is designed to achieve very sharp optical quality across a very wide field of view, so its strength is that it will produce beautiful images like these not only of a handful of objects but for billions. We need to map very large numbers of galaxies to perform the careful analysis needed to extract information about dark matter and dark energy, which is the main goal of the mission.
While these images are, in a sense, by-products of the Euclid mission, not specifically related to the main aims of the mission, they are interesting in their own right and there are proper scientific papers related to each of the five sets of observations released today. We expect many more non-cosmological spinoffs like these as the mission goes on.
There were some problems during the commissioning of the instruments carried by Euclid, the most serious of which was an issue with the Fine Guidance Sensor used to control the pointing of the telescope. This has been fixed by a software update and everything is now functioning well, as today’s new results confirm!
Just one more sleep before the first actual science images from European Space Agency’s Euclid mission are released tomorrow. These are called the Early Release Observations (EROs) – they aren’t part of the full survey, but are to demonstrate the performance of the telescope and detectors.
There has been a slight change to the schedule advertised here so the press conference will now take place on Tuesday 7th November at 14.15 Central European (not Summer) Time, CET, which is 13.15 GMT. For more details, see here.
You can watch the press conference on the new ESA Web TV channel or on the Youtube Live Stream. I’ll post a quick update tomorrow after the images go public.
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In the Dark 