Euclid, an ESA mission designed to characterise dark energy and dark matter, passed its Mission Critical Design Review in November 2018. It was demonstrated that the project is ready to start integration and test of the main systems, and that it has the ability to fulfil its top-level mission requirements. In addition, based on the performances at M-CDR, the scientific community has verified that the science requirements can be achieved for the Weak Lensing and Galaxy Clustering dark energy probes, namely a dark energy Figure of Merit of 400 and a 2% accuracy in the growth factor exponent gamma. We present the status of the main elements of the Euclid mission in the light of the demanding high optical performance which is the essential design driver is the to meet the scientific requirements. We include the space segment comprising of a service module and payload module hosting the telescope and its two scientific instruments, and the ground segment, which encompasses the operational and science ground segment. The elements for the scientific success of the mission for a timely release of the data are shortly presented: the processing and calibration of the data, and the design of the sky survey. Euclid is presently on schedule for a launch in September 2022.
Euclid is an ESA M2 mission which will create a 15,000 square degrees space-based survey: the Euclid Archive System (EAS) is a core element of the Science Ground Segment (SGS) of Euclid. The EAS follows a data-centric approach to data processing, whereby the Data Processing System (DPS) is responsible for the centralized metadata storage and the Distributed Storage System (DSS) supports the distributed storage of data files. The EAS-DPS implements the Euclid Common Data model and along with the EAS-DSS provides numerous services for Euclid Consortium users and SGS subsystems. In addition, the EAS-DPS assists in the preparation of Euclid data releases which are copied to the third EAS subsystem, the ESA developed Science Archive System (SAS) where they become available to the wider astronomical community. The EAS-DPS implements the object-oriented Euclid Common Data Model using a relational DBMS for the storage. The EAS-DPS supports the tracing of the lineage of any data item in the system, provides services for the data quality assessment and the data processing orchestration. The EAS-DSS is a distributed storage system which is based on a set of storage nodes located in each of the ten Science Data Centers of the Euclid SGS. The storage nodes supports a wide range of solutions from local disk, using a unix filesystem, to iRODS nodes or Grid storage elements. In this paper the architectural design of EAS-DPS and EAS-DSS are reviewed: the interaction between them and tests of the already implemented components are described.
Euclid is a Europe-led cosmology space mission dedicated to a visible and near infrared survey of the entire extra-galactic sky. Its purpose is to deepen our knowledge of the dark content of our Universe. After an overview of the Euclid mission and science, this contribution describes how the community is getting organized to face the data analysis challenges, both in software development and in operational data processing matters. It ends with a more specific account of some of the main contributions of the Swiss Science Data Center (SDC-CH).
Euclid is the second Medium Class mission of the Cosmic Vision programme of the European Space Agency. The launch date of this cosmology mission is foreseen in 2020 and the mission has a nominal duration of 6 years. Euclid carries a 1.2 meter telescope, which will survey 15, 000 deg(2) of extra-galactic sky in the visual and near-infrared. The mission is optimized to measure two complementary cosmological probes: weak lensing and galaxy clustering. The sub-arcsec resolution images of Euclid are of extremely high quality to meet the stringent weak-lensing requirements. Euclid will carry out near-infrared slitless spectroscopy of the same survey area, to investigate galaxy clustering. The data rate of Euclid is unprecedented for an ESA astronomy mission. The cosmology objectives of the mission can only be met with a large data processing effort, including data from ground based surveys. We present an overview of the science objectives and the resulting mission implementation and sky survey. We describe the Euclid science ground segment: the data flow and processing as well as its organisation.
Euclid is a space-based survey mission from the European Space Agency designed to understand the origin of the Universe's accelerating expansion. It will use cosmological probes to investigate the nature of dark energy, dark matter and gravity by tracking their observational signatures on the geometry of the universe and on the cosmic history of structure formation. The mission is optimised for two independent primary cosmological probes: Weak gravitational Lensing (WL) and Baryonic Acoustic Oscillations (BAO). The Euclid payload consists of a 1.2 m Korsch telescope designed to provide a large field of view. It carries two instruments with a common field-of-view of ~0.54 deg2: the visual imager (VIS) and the near infrared instrument (NISP) which contains a slitless spectrometer and a three bands photometer. The Euclid wide survey will cover 15,000 deg2 of the extragalactic sky and is complemented by two 20 deg2 deep fields. For WL, Euclid measures the shapes of 30-40 resolved galaxies per arcmin2 in one broad visible R+I+Z band (550-920 nm). The photometric redshifts for these galaxies reach a precision of dz/(1+z) < 0.05. They are derived from three additional Euclid NIR bands (Y, J, H in the range 0.92-2.0 micron), complemented by ground based photometry in visible bands derived from public data or through engaged collaborations. The BAO are determined from a spectroscopic survey with a redshift accuracy dz/(1+z) =0.001. The slitless spectrometer, with spectral resolution ~250, predominantly detects Ha emission line galaxies. Euclid is a Medium Class mission of the ESA Cosmic Vision 2015-2025 programme, with a foreseen launch date in 2019. This report (also known as the Euclid Red Book) describes the outcome of the Phase A study.