Euclid Independent Legacy Science page

Euclid is a space telescope mission scheduled for launch in 2022. It is being designed and built by the Euclid Consortium (EC) and the European Space Agency (ESA). The mission is being designed to map the geometry of the Universe using weak lensing and clustering of galaxies. However, the mission will be fantastic for many types of astrophysical legacy studies. I am involved with the mission as an Independent Legacy Scientist (ILS) appointed by ESA.

The telescope will use a 1.2-metre primary mirror to feed two instruments, beam split into a visible-wavelength range arm (called VIS, 550-900nm) and a near-IR arm (called NISP, 920-2000nm). The field of view of the telescope is about 0.5 deg². The main part of the mission called the wide survey will image 15000 deg² of the high Galactic latitude sky, also avoiding the ecliptic plane.

VIS imaging will be in one broad filter, with a stable point-spread function at the diffraction limit of the telescope and with a pixel size of 0.1 arcsec. The desired depth is to obtain a S/N of 10 for typical galaxies at 24.5 AB magnitudes i.e. this accounts for the galaxies being extended and not point sources.
NISP imaging will be in three filters Y, J and H, with a pixel size of 0.3 arcsec. The desired depth is to obtain a S/N of 5 at 24.0 AB magnitudes. A significant fraction of the exposure time in the NISP arm will be spent on slitless spectroscopy.

The ILS legacy science projects, for myself and my team, are to study:

Click on the above links for more details of our projects.

Related projects:

GAMA survey for spectroscopic redshifts and other multi-wavelength data;
DINGO survey for neutral Hydrogen gas masses and redshifts;
WAVES survey for spectroscopic redshifts with 4MOST to start about 2020.

Visit the EC website, or ESA website for more details of the mission.

Page written by Ivan Baldry, Independent Legacy Scientist, Euclid Science Team.

Link: - return to my research page.