Swiss contributions to the Euclid mission !

What is the Euclid mission?

Euclid is an astronomical spacecraft project set up by a European consortium and selected by the European Space Agency (ESA) in 2011 as a medium class mission of the Cosmic Vision 2015-2025 program. Recent astronomical observations indicate that our Universe is dominated by dark matter and energy of a so-far unknown nature. The Euclid plan is to survey almost  all of the extragalactic sky, with a mosaic of sharp images and spectra for the relatively bright sources. The main goal is to infer the amount and the distribution of these obscure and mysterious  matter / energy from the detailed properties of the distant light-emitting galaxies. This will be a major step forwards for a better understanding of the structure and of the history of our Universe.

Hardware contribution

Switzerland is responsible for providing the shutter of the visible instrument (VIS).

Ground data analysis contribution

The analysis of the Euclid data is an extremely challenging task due to the large volume and the complexity of the data. This task has been divided into a number of European consortia. The Science Working Groups (SWGs) are responsible for defining the requirements, the Organisational Units (OUs) are studying possible solutions by testing different algorithms and the Science Data Centers (SDCs) implement the software into operational frameworks. The SDCs will be in charge of the data processing after the launch (currently foreseen for 2019).

The Swiss Science Data Center (SDC-CH) is in charge of implementing software related to

• the determination of the distances of remote galaxies from the analysis of their colors (i.e., the photometric redshift),
• the characterization of the strong deformation observed when the light of remote galaxies goes trough a particularly large mass concentration (i.e., the so-called Strong lensing).

This site includes the main pages for the Swiss SDC (SDC_CH) and for the photometric redshift Organisational Unit (OU-PHZ).

Other Swiss contributors include the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology of Lausanne (Euclid@EPFL), the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland (FHNW), the department of theoritical physics of the University of Geneva (UniGE theoretical physics) and the University of Zurich (UniZH).