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Our responsibilities
The mission will last 6.5 years. During this time, Euclid will observe 15,000 square degrees of the sky, taking a sequence of ‘photographs’, each lasting over 10 minutes, in which the pointing direction of the telescope has to remain virtually motionless. The spacecraft will also have to keep the telescope always in the shadow of the screen that protects it from the sun’s radiation to observe the deeper Universe without interference. At the same time, the photovoltaic panels must always be illuminated, and this is why Euclid moves around the lagrangian point L2, accompanying the Earth in its revolution around the sun.
Producing the telescope’s pointing sequence (called survey strategy) required careful optimization, led by Italian scientists, that had to take into account the above requirements and the necessity to consume the minimum resources on board.
The result is the detailed sequence of commands that the ground control centre will send to the spacecraft and permit to virtually map all of the deep Universe observable from the solar system.
The Ground Segment (GS) of a scientific space mission is made up of two parts: one which deals with communicating directly with the instruments in flight, which is called the Operations Ground Segment (OGS), and one which deals with receiving data from the mission, to process them both for their scientific exploitation and for the monitoring of the instruments, and to disseminate the scientifically usable data – defined in jargon as reduced data – to the international community; the latter part is called the Science Ground Segment (SGS).
Most of the SGS of the Euclid mission is supplied by the Euclid Consortium (the part of the SGS that interfaces directly with the OGS is instead run by ESA) and is under Italian responsibility: the manager and support team are from the Trieste Astronomical Observatory.
The massive computing infrastructure that SGS has created to be able to analyze in time the enormous amount of data it will produce (between 20 and 30 Petabytes, i.e. between 20 and 30 million Gigabytes) required long years of planning and testing, and is distributed in the Science Data Centers of 9 countries (Italy, France, Spain, Great Britain, Finland, Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, USA).
Even after the launch of the Euclid mission, Italy will continue to have most of the responsibilities in the SGS: the global management of the SGS; the coordination of the verification of the performance of the two observational instruments on board (VIS and NISP) and the specific responsibility for those of the NISP instrument; the “reduction” of the data sent to earth from the satellite, i.e. their treatment starting from their correct formatting, the removal of instrumental effects in the NISP data, the processing of spectroscopic data, the construction of the catalogs of the detected sources, the elaboration of measurements of scientifically relevant properties possessed by those sources, up to the preparation of the scientific data of the Euclid mission to be made available to the scientific community worldwide.
The numbers of the Euclid Consortium
200
LABORATORIES
1650
ACTIVE MEMBERS
215
ITALIAN ACTIVE MEMBERS
14 European countries contribute to EC’s activities (Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Romania, Spain, Switzerland and the United Kingdom).
The United States, through NASA, are also members of the Euclid Consortium. Additionally, the Consortium entered into collaboration agreements with some research institutes in Canada, Japan and the United States.
13 Italian universities, 2 national institutes, and the Italian Space Agency are members of the Euclid Consortium
ASI – Agenzia Spaziale Italiana
INAF – Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica
INFN – Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare
SISSA – Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati
Alma Mater Studiorum – Università di Bologna
Università degli Studi di Milano Statale
Università degli Studi di Genova
Università degli Studi di Trieste
Università degli Studi di Torino
Università degli Studi di Padova
Università degli Studi di Ferrara
Università degli Studi di Roma 3
Università degli Studi di Roma La Sapienza
Università degli Studi di Roma Tor Vergata
Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II
Università degli Studi del Salento
Italian contribution to the mission
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Italy is a protagonist of the Euclid mission with France and the United Kingdom.
Thanks to the support of the Italian Space Agency (ASI), Italy has been able to assume leading responsibilities such as the definition of the survey (the method used to map the Universe), the management of the scientific part of the Ground Segment and the operations of the instruments in the flight, both managed by researchers of the National Institute of Astrophysics (INAF).
Italian researchers from the Universities of Bologna, Genoa, Milan and Trieste have relevant roles within the Consortium that works on the mission worldwide.
Italy is also responsible for the construction of the spacecraft itself, headed byin charge to Thales Alenia Space - Italy (TAS-I), which is the first contractor to ESA (European Space Agency). Thales Italia is also responsible for the service module and leads an industrial team of over 120 European companies.
As for the construction of scientific instruments, ASI funded the construction of some of the subsystems of both on-board instruments.
In collaboration with INAF and INFN, ASI led an industrial team constituted by a Temporary
Association of Companies - with OHB Italia in Milan as agent, SAB Aerospace S.R.L. (Benevento) and Temis Aerospace S.R.L. (Milan) as principals - that developed the two data processing and detector control units for the NISP instrument, and the data processing and control unit for the VIS instrument.
The grism wheel (dispersing prisms) for the NISP instrument, an integral part of the instrument optics, was also built in Italy.
The Italian partners
PEOPLE
Andrea Cimatti
Luigi Guzzo
Roberto Scaramella
Andrea Zacchei
Adriano Fontana
Luca Stanco
Luca Valenziano
Anna Maria Di Giorgio
Enzo Branchini
Stefano Borgani
Anna Gregorio
Paola Battaglia
Stefano Dusini
Enrico Franceschi
Chiara Sirignano
Sebastiano Ligori
Eduardo Medinaceli
Massimo Meneghetti
Margherita Talia
Marco Frailis
Stefano Andreon
Giuseppe Angora
Francesca Annibali
Natalia Auricchio
Carlo Baccigalupi
Marco Baldi
Andrea Balestra
Mario Ballardini
Sandro Bardelli
Nicola Bartolo
Tiago Batalha De Castro
Pietro Bergamini
José Bermejo
Daniele Bertacca
Matteo Biagetti
Laura Bisigello
Andrea Biviano
Micol Bolzonella
Andrea Bonchi
Marco Bonici
Donata Bonino
Maria Botticella
Massimo Brescia
Alessandro Bressan
Enzo Brocato
Marcella Brusa
Andrea Bulgarelli
Carlo Burigana
Deborah Busonero
Matteo Calabrese
Giorgio Calderone
Francesco Calura
Stefano Camera
Michele Cantiello
Vito Capobianco
Enrico Cappellaro
Alberto Cappi
Silvia Capriolo
Roberto Capuzzo
Carmelita Carbone
Vincenzo Cardone
Fernando Caro
Elisabetta Carella
Marco Castellano
Stefano Cavuoti
Paolo Ciliegi
Fabrizio Cogato
Vito Conforti
Sofia Contarini
Leonardo Corcione
Enrico Maria Corsini
Matteo Costanzi
Giovanni Covone
Giovanni Cresci
Stefano Cristiani
Olga Cucciati
Emanuele Dalessandro
Stefano Davini
Roberto Decarli
Massimo Della Valle
Gabriella De Lucia
Francesco De Paolis
Marco De Petris
Adriano De Rosa
Sergio Di Domizio
Paola Dimauro
Andrea Enia
Stefano Ettori
Maria Farina
Ruben Farinelli
Fabiana Faustini
Anna Feltre
Juan Fernandez
Fabio Finelli
Fabio Fontanot
Marco Frailis
Paolo Franzetti
Marco Fumana
Samuele Galeotta
Bianca Garilli
Thomas Gasparetto
Fulvio Gianotti
Carlo Giocoli
Marisa Girardi
Stefano Giuppi
Benjamin Granett
Claudio Grillo
Alessandro Gruppuso
Gianpaolo Guizzo
Gayathri Gururajan
Leslie Hunt
Lorenzo Ingoglia
Enrichetta Iodice
Angela Iovino
Fabio Lafranca
Andrea Lapi
Marius Lepinzan
Michele Liguori
Scige Liu
Xavier Lopez
Andrea Lorenzani
Gianmarco Maggio
Manuela Magliocchetti
Davide Maino
Elisabetta Maiorano
Chiara Mancini
Oriana Mansutti
Alessandro Marconi
Michele Maris
Gaetano Maron
Matteo Martinelli
Federico Marulli
Davide Massari
Sabino Matarrese
Amata Mercurio
Emiliano Merlin
Marco Mignoli
Pierluigi Monaco
Michele Moresco
Alberto Moretti
Alessia Moretti
Gianluca Morgante
Lauro Moscardini
Emiliano Munari
Paolo Natoli
Luciano Nicastro
Carlo Nipoti
Mario Nonino
Achille Nucita
Ronaldo Oliveira
Vincenzo Orofino
Francesco Pace
Eliana Palazzi
Daniela Paoletti
Kevin Pardede
Gabriele Parimbelli
Diego Paris
Fabio Pasian
Francesca Passalacqua
Silvia Pellegrini
Alessandro Pizzella
Lorenzo Pizzuti
Bianca Poggianti
Gianluca Polenta
Lucia Pozzetti
Isabella Prandoni
Salvatore Quai
Mario Radovich
Antonio Ragagnin
Alessandro Renzi
Giuseppe Riccio
Federico Rizzo
Ilaria Risso
Giulia Rodighiero
Erik Romelli
Mauro Roncarelli
Piero Rosati
Emanuel Rossetti
Andrea Russi
Jacopo Salvalaggio
Ruben Salvaterra
Alexandro Saro
Barbara Sartoris
Filomena Schiavone
Raffaella Schneider
Marco Scodeggio
Emiliano Sefusatti
Mauro Sereno
Francesca Sortino
Luigi Spinoglio
John Stephen
Francesco Strafella
Giuliano Taffoni
Margherita Talia
Daniele Tavagnacco
Gemma Tessera
Vincenzo Testa
Crescenzo Tortora
Silvano Tosi
Massimo Trifoglio
Tiziana Trombetti
Massimo Turatto
Eros Vanzella
Thomas Vassallo
Daniela Vergani
Alfonso Veropalumbo
Martina Vicinanza
Matteo Viel
Cristian Vignali
Nicola Vittorio
Claudio Vuerli
Benedetta Vulcani
Giovanni Zamorani
Elena Zucca
Italian companies involved
The contribution of Italian companies in Euclid, financed by ASI, involves OHB-Italia, in temporary association with SAB Aerospace and TEMIS, interested in the construction of
computers for the control and data analysis on board the two VIS and NISP instruments and of the grismGRISM wheel, used in the NISP spectrograph.
The Italian Data Processing Center is realized by ALTEC of Turin, with funds from ASI. Taking advantage of the experience gained on the ESA Gaia mission, ALTEC has created a complex computing infrastructure to host the SGS software of the Euclid Consortium.
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