Space South Central expertise helped ESA Euclid Mission take flight

Saturday 1 July saw the successful launch of ESA’s Euclid spacecraft on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida, starting an ambitious six-year mission to explore the composition and evolution of the dark Universe. 

Euclid, lifted off on a Space X Falcon 9 from Cape Canaveral, Florida, USA.

The Euclid space telescope will map the dark Universe across space and time, observing billions of galaxies out to 10 billion light years to gather data on how its structure has formed over its cosmic history, the role of gravity and the nature of dark energy and dark matter.  It features a UK-built visible imager (VIS) – one of the largest cameras ever sent into space – and a near-infrared spectrometer and photometer developed in France.

Backed by £37 million of funding from the UK Space Agency, Euclid is the result of many years of work from 2,000 experts and organisations across 16 countries – including Space South Central’s partner universities of Portsmouth, Southampton and Surrey, and UCL’s Mullard Space Science Laboratory in Dorking, Surrey.

UCL Mullard Space Science Laboratory
UCL received £20.5 million of UK Space Agency funding to lead on the design, building and testing of Euclid’s VIS optical camera, which will take high-resolution, panoramic images of a large swathe of the Universe, going back 10 billion years and covering a third of the night sky.

The core electronics for the instrument, including its complex array of 36 CCDs that convert photons into electrons), were built at UCL’s Mullard Space Science Laboratory in Surrey. 

Professor Mark Cropper, leader of the VIS camera team, said: “The VIS instrument will image the distant Universe with almost the fine resolution of the Hubble Space Telescope, observing more of the Universe in one day than Hubble did in 25 years. 

“The data will allow us to infer the distribution of dark matter across the Universe more precisely than ever before.”

The University of Portsmouth
The UK Space Agency awarded the university £1.8 million to work on Euclid’s software, and Professor Adam Amara, Director of Portsmouth’s Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation (ICG), was one of the first people to propose the idea for the telescope that was to become Euclid, 18 years ago.  

Professor Amara said: “In 2005, a tiny group of us launched this idea. Now, almost 20 years later, thousands of people have worked together to make this dream a reality. 

“The next phase, where we actually measure the universe, is going to be incredibly exciting. Who knows what new discoveries await us?”

The University of Portsmouth’s team, led by Ernest Rutherford Fellow, Dr Seshadri Nadathur from the ICG, worked with the wider European team, writing code to help analyse Euclid’s data.

Dr Nadathur said: “Galaxies are not randomly scattered around the sky – instead, there are patterns in their positions that are relics of correlations created at the time of the Big Bang, shaped over billions of years by the interplay of gravity pulling galaxies together and the expansion of the Universe driving them apart. 

“By measuring and understanding these patterns in the maps Euclid provides, we will learn about the mysterious force of dark energy that seems to be driving the Universe to expand ever faster.

“The team at Portsmouth has been busy developing and testing software that builds the maps and allows them to correct for any spurious patterns in the galaxy positions that arise purely due to variations in the performance of the telescope and instruments so that we can isolate the true cosmological patterns we are interested in.”

The University of Southampton
Professor of Astrophysics Francesco Shankar, from the University of Southampton, is part of the international consortium working on Euclid with NASA and the European Space Agency. 

He said the satellite will create a giant map of the universe's structure by observing billions of galaxies, adding: “The Euclid space telescope will chart the distribution of galaxies across cosmic space and time to reveal the rate of expansion and formation of the universe.  These are invaluable observational constraints which can shed light on the nature of dark energy.

Scientists will use the data collected by the satellite not only to test dark energy, dark matter, and alternative gravity theories, but also to unravel the evolution of galaxies and supermassive black holes, which is the subject of Prof Shankar and his team’s work at Southampton.

Professor Shankar said: “Dark energy and dark matter are elusive components – and we don’t know much about either.

“By imaging billions of galaxies, Euclid will give us data on the structure of the universe up to very large scales and at different cosmic epochs, providing invaluable observational constraints on the nature of dark matter and dark energy.”

The University of Surrey
Professor Bob Nichol, the university’s Pro Vice-Chancellor and Executive Dean of the Faculty of Engineering and Physical Sciences, is a cosmologist and astrophysicist who has worked on the Euclid telescope since its inception. 

When deciding which project to develop as part of Cosmic Vision in 2007, ESA invited him to join a panel of independent experts to differentiate between two proposals for investigating dark matter and dark energy.  The panel advised they merge both, and Euclid was born. 

Professor Nichol is one of just two British scientists on the board overseeing the leadership of the Euclid Consortium or more than 2,000 scientists working together to exploit the Euclid data.

Professor Nichol said: “There are two scientific instruments aboard Euclid: the visible instrument known as VIS and the near-infrared spectrometer and photometer, known as NISP. They measure different things, but when combined with data from ground-based telescopes, we will have optimised the information scientists can glean about both dark matter and dark energy.

“We’ll use measurement techniques which have been deployed in the local Universe, but Euclid will do it for the first time in the distant Universe, closer in time to the Big Bang, continuing to map the expansion history of the Universe in greater detail.”

Professor Nichol also co-wrote an article for The Conversation, explaining how the Euclid mission will test alternative theories of gravity, with Tessa Baker, a Royal Society University Research Fellow and Reader in Cosmology at Queen Mary University of London.

Dr Paul Bate, Chief Executive of the UK Space Agency, said: “Watching the launch of Euclid, I feel inspired by the years of hard work from thousands of people that go into space science missions, and the fundamental importance of discovery – how we set out to understand and explore the Universe.

“The UK Space Agency’s £37 million investment in Euclid has supported world-class science on this journey, from the development of the ground segment to the build of the crucial visible imager instrument, which will help humanity begin to uncover the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy.”

As well as aiming to answer some of science's most fundamental questions about the nature of the universe, Euclid is set to revolutionise studies across astronomy, providing a lasting legacy database for professional astronomers and the public to explore. To find out more, visit eucliduk.net.

Space South Central helps connect our region’s space experts and organisations with projects around the world - visit spacesouthcentral.com/global to find out more.