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WELCOME ON THE EUCLID-FRANCE #13 CONFERENCE WEB SITE
Euclid is a major mission of the European Space Agency (ESA) Cosmic Vision programme. This international reference mission in cosmology aims to understand the source of the accelerating expansion of the universe, the nature of dark energy and gravitation through the observation of several billion galaxies, tracing the history of the universe over more than 10 billion years.
The scale of this mission requires an organisation - the Euclid Consortium - that brings together around 2,000 researchers, engineers and technicians from all European countries, with participation from the USA, Canada and Japan. As a major participant in this project, France, via CNES, has provided the laboratories with the means to contribute to this mission. With about 250 active Euclid members in France - including the mission's scientific leader (Yannick Mellier, IAP) and his deputy (Francis Bernardeau, IAP) - CNES, CNRS, CEA and the partner universities are providing significant human resources and technical infrastructure.
Euclid at CEA-Saclay
The Institut de Recherche sur les Lois Fondamentales de l'Univers (Irfu) has been involved in the Euclid project for many years, having supported one of its ‘progenitors’, the DUNE project. Three Irfu departments have been particularly active in the development of the mission: the Astrophysics Department (DAp), the Department of Electronics, Detectors and Computing for Physics (DEDIP) and the Systems Engineering Department (DIS), which are joined by researchers from the Particle Physics Department (DPhP) for the scientific exploitation of the mission.
Irfu's work focused on the VIS and NISP instruments. For VIS, the CEA worked mainly on the focal plane (design, production and integration of the focal plane) and on the motor and power control electronics (to manage the instrument's shutter, among other things). For the NISP instrument, the CEA developed, validated and supplied the cryo-mechanisms that enable the filter and grism wheels to perform the thousands of rotations that will be required of them.
In parallel with these instrumental achievements, Irfu has scientific responsibility for the Euclid ground segment, and is particularly involved in the development of level 3 codes, as well as in the understanding and modelling of the telescope's PSF, with a view to measuring weak gravitational shear.
Lastly, the Irfu teams are focused on the exploitation of scientific data from the weak-lensing probe, the study of galaxy clusters as such and as cosmological tracers, and the evolution of galaxies.
Euclid at Paris-Saclay University
In addition to Irfu, Université Paris-Saclay has also been involved in the development of Euclid with the Institut d'Astrophysique Spatiale (IAS), where the in-flight calibration unit for the VIS instrument was built. The IAS is also contributing to the development of the ground segment through the MER unit, which is responsible for fusing ground and space data for imaging. Its teams are involved in the scientific groups (SWG) on galaxy clusters, CMB cross correlation, galaxies and AGN, and theory.
Finally, the Interdisciplinary Digital Science Laboratory (LISN) is studying the applicability of its methods to the scientific exploitation of Euclid data.
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