Here’s a little video update to accompany the news that, as of yesterday (28th July), the European Space Agency’s Euclid spacecraft has reached its orbit around L2, the second Lagrange Point of the Earth-Sun system:
More news is on the way. Commissioning of the instruments is now complete and the telescope is in focus. On Monday 31st July, ESA will release the first actual images from the Euclid telescope!
Stay tuned here.
The Euclid spacecraft launched over a week ago so so here’s a short video explaining its trajectory and what it will do over the next weeks and months.
Today’s the day! Weather permitting, of course, all eyes will be on Cape Canaveral for the launch of the Euclid satellite later this afternoon (as reckoned in Ireland). You can watch the launch on YouTube via the following stream (but it won’t start until 15.30 Irish Time; 16.30 CEST):
The Key Events to look for in local time are:
16:12 Euclid launch on SpaceX Falcon 9
16:53 Separation of Euclid from Falcon 9
16:57 Earliest expected time to establish communication with Euclid
After that, the mission is handed over to the ESA Space Operations Centre in Darmstadt, Germany as it sets out for the Sun-Earth Lagrange point L2. Approximately four weeks after launch, Euclid will enter in orbit around this point, which is located at 1.5 million km from Earth, in the opposite direction from the Sun. Once in orbit, mission operators will start verifying all the functions of the telescope. During this, residual water is outgassed, after which Euclid’s instruments will be turned on. Between one and three months after launch, Euclid will go through several calibrations and scientific performance tests and get ready for science. The telescope begins its early phase of the survey of the Universe three months after launch. There will be a preliminary release of a small amount of data in December 2024, but the first full data release – DR1 – will take about two years.
UPDATE: All critical stages of the launch passed satisfactorily, and contact has been established with the ground control. Euclid is now on its way to L2. Bon Voyage, Euclid!
I’ve spent a sizeable chunk of the last two days answering press enquiries concerning the Euclid mission, due to be launch about 24 hours from now. Here is a picture of Euclid in the Falcon 9 fairing, getting ready to be moved to the launch facility. It’s all getting very real!
After talking with their researcher yesterday, this morning I did a short interview on Morning Ireland, which is on RTÉ Radio 1. It was shorter than I imagined because the previous item – about the ongoing ructions at RTÉ over various financial scandals – understandably overran quite a bit. The presenter, Rachel English, was very nice though and I think it went fairly well. I did another short interview on Newstalk Radio on a programme called Hard Shoulder, which took place at 5.48pm. I also spoke to a journalist from the Sunday Times Irish Edition, who I think will run a story on Sunday.
Anyway, the purpose of this media stuff is not to try to grab headlines – my involvement in Euclid is very small, really – but to generate some interest in the hope that Ireland takes a more active role in future space missions. I don’t know whether it will work, but I hope it does, and I feel obliged to try although it has made for a very busy day indeed!
With just three days to go before the scheduled launch of the Euclid spacecraft on Saturday 1st July 2023, at 1612 Irish Time (GMT+1), the Education and Public Outreach (EPO) team have been continuing to ramp up its social media activity and the second YouTube video has now “dropped” (as you young people say).
This was filmed at Thales Alenia Space in Cannes, France, as members of the Euclid consortium from around the world gathered in anticipation to see the fully-assembled Euclid telescope for the first time as it underwent final tests before its journey to the launch site in Florida.
With the scheduled launch of ESA’s Euclid mission coming up this weekend, it is perhaps topical to share the document written almost 12 years ago that outlines the design concepts and describes the detailed scientific case. It’s a compendious piece, running to well over 100 pages but, as with virtually everything in astrophysics, the full Euclid Definition Study Report can be found on arXiv.
Here is the abstract:
Euclid is a space-based survey mission from the European Space Agency designed to understand the origin of the Universe’s accelerating expansion. It will use cosmological probes to investigate the nature of dark energy, dark matter and gravity by tracking their observational signatures on the geometry of the universe and on the cosmic history of structure formation. The mission is optimised for two independent primary cosmological probes: Weak gravitational Lensing (WL) and Baryonic Acoustic Oscillations (BAO). The Euclid payload consists of a 1.2 m Korsch telescope designed to provide a large field of view. It carries two instruments with a common field-of-view of ~0.54 deg2: the visual imager (VIS) and the near infrared instrument (NISP) which contains a slitless spectrometer and a three bands photometer. The Euclid wide survey will cover 15,000 deg2 of the extragalactic sky and is complemented by two 20 deg2 deep fields. For WL, Euclid measures the shapes of 30-40 resolved galaxies per arcmin2 in one broad visible R+I+Z band (550-920 nm). The photometric redshifts for these galaxies reach a precision of dz/(1+z) < 0.05. They are derived from three additional Euclid NIR bands (Y, J, H in the range 0.92-2.0 micron), complemented by ground based photometry in visible bands derived from public data or through engaged collaborations. The BAO are determined from a spectroscopic survey with a redshift accuracy dz/(1+z) =0.001. The slitless spectrometer, with spectral resolution ~250, predominantly detects Ha emission line galaxies. Euclid is a Medium Class mission of the ESA Cosmic Vision 2015-2025 programme, with a foreseen launch date in 2019. This report (also known as the Euclid Red Book) describes the outcome of the Phase A study.
arXiv:1110.3193
Euclid was formally adopted as an ESA M Class mission in June 2012. I’ve added the emphasis to the penultimate sentence to draw your attention to the fact that the launch of Euclid is about four years late.
With less than a week to go before the scheduled launch of the Euclid spacecraft on Saturday 1st July 2023, at 1612 Irish Time (GMT+1), the Education and Public Outreach (EPO) team has been ramping up its social media activity. They’ve even got a blog! Anyway here is a nice video featuring many members of the Euclid Consortium – some of whom gave presentations at last week’s conference – talking about Euclid. The sense of enthusiasm shines through, I think. I will be sharing further videos when they appear.
It was officially announced at the Euclid Consortium Meeting in Copenhagen this morning that I have been appointed to the role of Chair of the Euclid Consortium Diversity Committee (ECDC). This has been in the pipeline for a while, but I have refrained from saying anything publicly until the appointment was endorsed by the Euclid Consortium Lead (ECL) and Euclid Consortium Board (ECB) which has now happened.
The previous Chair, Prof. Mathilde Jauzac, is stepping down because her term on the ECDC has come to an end. I’ve been a member of the ECDC for three years during which time Mathilde has done a brilliant job as Chair and she’ll be a very difficult act to follow in this role. There was a standing ovation in the room this morning when Mathilde finished delivering her final ECDC report. It will be down to me to deliver next year’s report, at the 2024 Euclid Consortium Meeting, which will be in Rome.
Instead of trying to describe the role and activities of the ECDC generally, I will direct you to the information given on the brand new Euclid Consortium website which is a one-stop shop for everything to do with Euclid. You can find specific information about Equity, Diversity and Conduct there and/or on the ECDC’s own public website here from which I’ve taken a screengrab of the nice banner:
Just for information, the Euclid Consortium has about 2700 members so it really is a very large organization, and it is the aim of the ECDC to encourage a positive and inclusive environment within it for the benefit of everyone in it.
I’m looking forward to this role for the next year. I have only one year left of my term left on the ECDC so I will almost certainly be Chair for one year only. As regular readers of this blog – both of them – will know, I am on sabbatical next year which means I should have time to take on this responsibility, which I wouldn’t be able to do if I had my full teaching and admin load.
Quick update from the Euclid Consortium confirming that the launch will take place on Saturday 1st July 2023, at 1612 Irish Time (GMT+1):
If for some reason (such as weather) the launch cannot take place at 11.12 precisely it will be delayed for 24 hours and then launched the next day, 2nd July, at the same time. I’m told that thunderstorms are quite common at Cape Canaveral at this time of year so there may well be such a delay.
P.S. When the Euclid mission was accepted by ESA, over a decade ago, the launch date was envisaged to be in 2020, so it is about three years late.
I made it to the conference venue (CPH Conference) for this year’s Euclid Consortium Meeting, which is 5 minutes walk from my hotel.
One thing that confused me when I looked at the programme last night was that all the rooms in the conference centre are named after locations in and around the city, e.g. Kastrup, Amager, Vesterbro, etc. For a while I thought the delegates would be running around Copenhagen to find their parallel sessions! Then I realized these were just names of meeting rooms…
The full programme doesn’t start until tomorrow but today I attended a couple of sessions aimed at early career researchers, not because I identify myself as such but because I wanted to listen to questions they asked and the advice given to them, much of which was very sound.
I’m looking forward to tomorrow, especially the plenaries, but first: dinner.
In the Dark 