Euclid Telescope Will Study Dark Energy and Dark Matter
Posted on June 20, 2012
The Euclid mission will study the "dark Universe." The UK teams working on the mission have been granted a planned 8.5 million pounds by the UK Space Agency to develop specific instruments. The follows the formal adoption of the largest collaboration of astronomers in the world by the European Space Agency (ESA) to help build the Euclid satellite. An artist's impression of Euclid is pictured above and below.
Nearly 1,000 scientists from 100 European and US institutes comprise the Euclid Consortium building the instruments and participating in the scientific harvest of the mission.
Euclid will use a 1.2-m diameter telescope and the two instruments to map the three-dimensional distribution of some two billion galaxies and of the dark matter that surrounds them, over one third of the whole sky. The scientists say the Euclid will generate a huge amount of exceptional quality data over a large percentage of the sky. It will require sophisticated computer resources dedicated to analyzing this data, looking for the miniscule signature of dark energy.
David Parker, Director of Technology, Science and Exploration at the UK Space Agency, says, "This is a huge mission - from the importance of the data Euclid will collect to the size of the team involved in putting it into space. The UK is playing a considerable part in both of the instruments and the Science Ground Segment. It is a fantastic example of the leadership of our scientists and facilities. At the heart of the mission is one of the billion pound questions of physics and the UK Space Agency is proud to be funding the teams that are working to unlock some of the great mysteries of the Universe."