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NASA Delivers Hardware for ESA Dark Energy Mission The
European Space Agency's Euclid mission, set to launch in 2022, will investigate
two of the biggest mysteries in modern astronomy: dark matter and dark energy. A
team of NASA engineers recently delivered critical hardware for one of the
instruments that will fly on Euclid and probe these cosmic puzzles.
Based
at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, and the Goddard
Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, the engineers designed, fabricated and
tested 20 pieces of sensor-chip electronics (SCEs) hardware for Euclid (16 for
the flight instrument and four backups). These parts, which operate at minus 213
degrees Fahrenheit (minus 136 degrees Celsius), are responsible for precisely
amplifying and digitizing the tiny signals from the light detectors in Euclid's
Near Infrared Spectrometer and Photometer (NISP) instrument. The Euclid
observatory will also carry a visible-light imaging instrument.
The
image, taken in May 2019, above shows the detectors and sensor-chip electronics
on a flight model of the NISP instrument in the Laboratory of Astrophysics of
Marseille in France. Eighteen SCEs have been delivered to the European Space
Agency (ESA), and two more will soon be on their way. The detector system will
undergo extensive testing ahead of launch.
"Even
under the best of circumstances, it is extremely challenging to design and
build very sensitive and complex electronics that function reliably at very
cold operating temperatures," said Moshe Pniel, the U.S. project manager
for Euclid at JPL, who led the team that delivered the sensor-chip electronics.
"This truly remarkable team, spread across two NASA centers, accomplished
this task under intense schedule pressure and international attention."
Euclid
will conduct a survey of billions of distant galaxies, which are moving away
from us at a faster and faster rate as the expansion of space itself
accelerates. Scientists don't know what causes this accelerating expansion but have
named the source of this phenomenon dark energy. By observing the effect of
dark energy on the distribution of a large population of galaxies, scientists
will try to narrow down what could possibly be
driving this mysterious phenomenon.
In
addition, Euclid will provide insights into the mystery of dark matter. While
we can't see dark matter, it's five times more prevalent in the universe than
the "regular" matter that makes up planets, stars and everything else
we can see in the universe.
To
detect dark matter, scientists look for the effects of its gravity. Euclid's
census of distant galaxies will reveal how the large-scale structure of the
universe is shaped by the interplay of regular matter, dark matter and dark
energy. This in turn will allow scientists to learn more about the properties
and effects of both dark matter and dark energy in the universe, and to get
closer to understanding their fundamental nature.
The
NISP instrument is led by the Laboratory of Astrophysics of Marseille, with
contributions from 15 countries, including the United States, through an agreement
between ESA and NASA.
Three
NASA-supported science groups contribute to the Euclid mission. In addition to
designing and fabricating the NISP sensor-chip electronics, JPL led the
procurement and delivery of the NISP detectors. Those detectors were tested at
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. The Euclid NASA Science Center at IPAC
(ENSCI), at Caltech, will support U.S.-based investigations using Euclid data.
For more information about Euclid go to:
https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/euclid/main/index.html
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