Euclid launch Saturday 1st July 2023

The Euclid Satellite, a project on which the Kapteyn Astronomical Institute has worked for more than 15 years, was launched at 17:12 (CEST) on the 1st July.
The commissioning phase will last for one month until the start of August. The performance verification phase will take another two months.

Euclid: the mission
Euclid is an ESA mission to map the geometry of the Universe and better understand the mysterious dark matter and dark energy, which make up most of the energy budget of the cosmos. The mission will investigate the distance-redshift relationship and the evolution of cosmic structures by measuring shapes and redshifts of galaxies and clusters of galaxies out to redshifts ~2, or equivalently to a look-back time of 10 billion years. In this way, Euclid will cover the entire period over which dark energy played a significant role in accelerating the expansion of the Universe.

Euclid Netherlands Science Data Centre
The processing of Euclid data will take place at 9 national science data centres such as the Netherlands Euclid Science Data Centre. This has been jointly run by the Kapteyn Institute and the CIT, with the participation of the Leiden Observatory. We expect the first data to be processed by the Euclid Netherlands Science Data Centre in August 2023.

Euclid Archive System
The Netherlands Science Data Centre and the European Space Astronomy Centre (ESAC) developed the Euclid Archive System (EAS) which is the core of the Euclid Science Ground Segment and represents a new generation of data-centric scientific information systems. It will manage up to one hundred petabytes of mission data in a heterogeneous storage environment and will allow intensive access both to the data and metadata produced during the mission.

The first Euclid detector data was ingested into the EAS on the 12th July 2023. The EAS will become a key part of the operations when the performance verification phase starts in August 2023.

Euclid External Data
External optical ground-based surveys must be combined with a Near Infra-red space-based survey to determine the galaxy photometric redshifts and stellar Spectral Energy Distributions to the required accuracy for cosmology. The team leading this is jointly lead by the Kapteyn Institute.

External data must be available to support the performance verification phase, so this activity is a priority for the Kapteyn Institute team at the moment. The external data for all performance verification fields must be available by the start of August 2023.

Euclid Commissioning News
ESA publishes regular updates on Euclid commissioning