Euclid: a space mission to map the Dark Universe.

Group members: Bianca Garilli, Marco Scodeggio, Dario Bottini, Paolo Franzetti, Luigi Paioro, Marco Fumana, Maurizio Tomasi, Fabio Gastaldello, Mariachiara Rossetti, Alexander Fritz, Letizia Cassarà

Euclid is an ESA medium class mission selected for launch in 2019 in the Cosmic Vision 2015-2025 programme. The main goal of Euclid is to understand the origin of the accelerating expansion of the Universe. To achieve this, the Euclid satellite will be equipped with a 1.2 m telescope and three imaging and spectroscopic instruments working in the visible and near-infrared wavelength domains. These instruments will explore the expansion history of the Universe and the evolution of cosmic structures with look back time by measuring shapes and redshifts of galaxies as well as the distribution of clusters of galaxies as function of redshift over a very large fraction of the sky. Euclid will carry out its mission on a libration orbit around the Sun-Earth second Lagrange point (L2), similar to that used by the Herschel and Planck satellites.

IASF-Milano has been deeply involved in all phases of the project, starting from the original SPACE proposal. Currently our activities are concentrated mainly in the following areas:

• Within the Euclid Science Ground Segment (SGS), we lead OU-SIR, the Organization Unit (OU) in charge of designing the spectroscopic data reduction pipeline, and a number of its Work Packages; we lead a number of Work Packages within OU-SPE, the OU in charge of designing the quantitative measurements to be carried out on the Euclid spectroscopic data, and within OU-SIM, the OU in charge of providing simulated data to the Euclid Consortium; we participate to the activities of the SGS System Team, where the global hardware and software structure of the SGS will be defined, as well as to OU-LE3 activities on clusters of galaxies.

• Within the Near Infrared Imaging Spectrograph (NISP) Instrument Team, we are in charge of the Instrument Scientific Performance Evaluation, and we participate to the global mission end-to-end simulations group.

• We participate to the activities of a number of Euclid Science Working Groups (SWG), namely: Galaxy Clustering, Galaxy and AGN evolution, Clusters of Galaxies, Primeval Universe, Strong Lensing and CMB Cross-correlations

Related links :

The Euclid Consortium Web page

The Euclid Web page at ESA