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.
eROSITA (extended ROentgen Survey with an Imaging Telescope Array) is the core instrument on the Russian/German Spektrum-Roentgen-Gamma (SRG) mission which is now officially scheduled for launch on March 26, 2016. eROSITA will perform a deep survey of the entire X-ray sky. In the soft band (0.5-2 keV), it will be about 30 times more sensitive than ROSAT, while in the hard band (2-8 keV) it will provide the first ever true imaging survey of the sky. The design driving science is the detection of large samples of galaxy clusters to redshifts z < 1 in order to study the large scale structure in the universe and test cosmological models including Dark Energy. In addition, eROSITA is expected to yield a sample of a few million AGN, including obscured objects, revolutionizing our view of the evolution of supermassive black holes. The survey will also provide new insights into a wide range of astrophysical phenomena, including X-ray binaries, active stars and diffuse emission within the Galaxy. eROSITA is currently (June 2014) in its flight model and calibration phase. All seven flight mirror modules (+ 1 spare) have been delivered and measured in X-rays. The first camera including the complete electronics has been extensively tested (vacuum + X-rays). A pre-test of the final end-toend test has been performed already. So far, all subsystems and components are well within their expected performances.
Joseph Mohr, Robert Armstrong, Emmanuel Bertin, Greg Daues, Shantanu Desai, Michelle Gower, Robert Gruendl, William Hanlon, Nikolay Kuropatkin, Huan Lin, John Marriner, Donald Petravic, Ignacio Sevilla, Molly Swanson, Todd Tomashek, Douglas Tucker, Brian Yanny
The Dark Energy Survey (DES) is a 5000 deg2 grizY survey reaching characteristic photometric depths of 24th magnitude (10 sigma) and enabling accurate photometry and morphology of objects ten times fainter than in SDSS. Preparations for DES have included building a dedicated 3 deg2 CCD camera (DECam), upgrading the existing CTIO Blanco 4m telescope and developing a new high performance computing (HPC) enabled data management system (DESDM). The DESDM system will be used for processing, calibrating and serving the DES data. The total data volumes are high (~ 2PB), and so considerable effort has gone into designing an automated processing and quality control system. Special purpose image detrending and photometric calibration codes have been developed to meet the data quality requirements, while survey astrometric calibration, coaddition and cataloging rely on new extensions of the AstrOmatic codes which now include tools for PSF modeling, PSF homogenization, PSF corrected model fitting cataloging and joint model fitting across multiple input images. The DESDM system has been deployed on dedicated development clusters and HPC systems in the US and Germany. An extensive program of testing with small rapid turn-around and larger campaign simulated datasets has been carried out. The system has also been tested on large real datasets, including Blanco Cosmology Survey data from the Mosaic2 camera. In Fall 2012 the DESDM system will be used for DECam commissioning, and, thereafter, the system will go into full science operations.
eROSITA (extended ROentgen Survey with an Imaging Telescope Array) is the core instrument on the Russian
Spektrum-Roentgen-Gamma (SRG) mission which is scheduled for launch in 2013. eROSITA will perform an all-sky
survey lasting four years, followed by a phase of three years for pointed observations. eROSITA consists of seven
identical Mirror Modules, each equipped with 54 Wolter-I shells with an outer diameter of 360 mm. This would provide
an effective area of ~1500 cm2 at 1.5 keV and an on axis PSF HEW of 15 arcsec resulting in an effective angular
resolution of 28 arcsec averaged over the field of view. In the focus of each mirror module, a fast frame-store pn-CCD
provides a field of view of 1°in diameter. In this paper we report on the instrument development and its status only.
eROSITA (extended ROentgen Survey with an Imaging Telescope Array) is the core instrument on the Russian Spektrum-Roentgen-Gamma (SRG) mission which is scheduled for launch in late 2012. eROSITA is fully approved and funded by the German Space Agency DLR and the Max-Planck-Society. The instrument development is in phase C/D since fall 2009. The design driving science is the detection 100.000 Clusters of Galaxies up to redshift z ~1.3 in order to study the large scale structure in the Universe and test cosmological models, especially Dark Energy. This will be accomplished by an all-sky survey lasting for four years plus a phase of pointed observations. eROSITA consists of seven Wolter-I telescope modules, each equipped with 54 Wolter-I shells having an outer diameter of 360 mm. This would provide an effective area of ~1500 cm2 at 1.5 keV and an on axis PSF HEW of 15 arcsec resulting in an effective angular resolution of 28 - 30 arcsec, averaged over the field of view. In the focus of each mirror module, a fast frame-store pn-CCD provides a field of view of 1° in diameter.
Joseph Mohr, Darren Adams, Wayne Barkhouse, Cristina Beldica, Emmanuel Bertin, Y. Dora Cai, Luiz A. Nicolaci da Costa, J. Anthony Darnell, Gregory Daues, Michael Jarvis, Michelle Gower, Huan Lin, Leandro Martelli, Eric Neilsen, Chow-Choong Ngeow, Ricardo Ogando, Alex Parga, Erin Sheldon, Douglas Tucker, Nikolay Kuropatkin, Chris Stoughton
KEYWORDS: Data archive systems, Databases, Galactic astronomy, Image processing, Calibration, Point spread functions, Photometry, Data processing, Data storage, Computing systems
The Dark Energy Survey (DES) collaboration will study cosmic acceleration with a 5000 deg2griZY survey in the
southern sky over 525 nights from 2011-2016. The DES data management (DESDM) system will be used to process
and archive these data and the resulting science ready data products. The DESDM system consists of an integrated
archive, a processing framework, an ensemble of astronomy codes and a data access framework. We are developing the
DESDM system for operation in the high performance computing (HPC) environments at the National Center for
Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and Fermilab. Operating the DESDM system in an HPC environment offers
both speed and flexibility. We will employ it for our regular nightly processing needs, and for more compute-intensive
tasks such as large scale image coaddition campaigns, extraction of weak lensing shear from the full survey dataset, and
massive seasonal reprocessing of the DES data. Data products will be available to the Collaboration and later to the
public through a virtual-observatory compatible web portal. Our approach leverages investments in publicly available
HPC systems, greatly reducing hardware and maintenance costs to the project, which must deploy and maintain only the
storage, database platforms and orchestration and web portal nodes that are specific to DESDM. In Fall 2007, we tested
the current DESDM system on both simulated and real survey data. We used Teragrid to process 10 simulated DES
nights (3TB of raw data), ingesting and calibrating approximately 250 million objects into the DES Archive database.
We also used DESDM to process and calibrate over 50 nights of survey data acquired with the Mosaic2 camera.
Comparison to truth tables in the case of the simulated data and internal crosschecks in the case of the real data indicate
that astrometric and photometric data quality is excellent.
The Dark Energy Survey (DES; operations 2009-2015) will address the nature of dark energy using four independent and complementary techniques: (1) a galaxy cluster survey over 4000 deg2 in collaboration with the South Pole Telescope Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect mapping experiment, (2) a cosmic shear measurement over 5000 deg2, (3) a galaxy angular clustering measurement within redshift shells to redshift=1.35, and (4) distance measurements to 1900 supernovae Ia. The DES will produce 200 TB of raw data in four bands, These data will be processed into science ready images and catalogs and co-added into deeper, higher quality images and catalogs. In total, the DES dataset will exceed 1 PB, including a 100 TB catalog database that will serve as a key science analysis tool for the astronomy/cosmology community. The data rate, volume, and duration of the survey require a new type of data management (DM) system that (1) offers a high degree of automation and robustness and (2) leverages the existing high performance computing infrastructure to meet the project's DM targets. The DES DM system consists of (1) a gridenabled, flexible and scalable middleware developed at NCSA for the broader scientific community, (2) astronomy
modules that build upon community software, and (3) a DES archive to support automated processing and to serve DES catalogs and images to the collaboration and the public. In the recent DES Data Challenge 1 we deployed and tested the first version of the DES DM system, successfully reducing 700 GB of raw simulated images into 5 TB of reduced data products and cataloguing 50 million objects with calibrated astrometry and photometry.
Dark Energy dominates the mass-energy content of the universe (about 73%) but we do not understand it. Most of the remainder of the Universe consists of Dark Matter (23%), made of an unknown particle. The problem of the origin of Dark Energy has become the biggest problem in astrophysics and one of the biggest problems in all of science. The major extant X-ray observatories, the Chandra X-ray Observatory and XMM-Newton, do not have the ability to perform large-area surveys of the sky. But Dark Energy is smoothly distributed throughout the universe and the whole universe is needed to study it. There are two basic methods to explore the properties of Dark Energy, viz. geometrical tests (supernovae) and studies of the way in which Dark Energy has influenced the large scale structure of the universe and its evolution. DUO will use the latter method, employing the copious X-ray emission from clusters of galaxies. Clusters of galaxies offer an ideal probe of cosmology because they are the best tracers of Dark Matter and their distribution on very large scales is dominated by the Dark Energy. In order to take the next step in understanding Dark Energy, viz. the measurement of the 'equation of state' parameter 'w', an X-ray telescope following the design of ABRIXAS will be accommodated into a Small Explorer mission in lowearth orbit. The telescope will perform a scan of 6,000 sq. degs. in the area of sky covered by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (North), together with a deeper, smaller survey in the Southern hemisphere. DUO will detect 10.000 clusters of galaxies, measure the number density of clusters as a function of cosmic time, and the power spectrum of density fluctuations out to a redshift exceeding one. When combined with the spectrum of density fluctuations in the Cosmic Microwave Background from a redshift of 1100, this will provide a powerful lever arm for the crucial measurement of cosmological parameters.
A new 10 meter diameter telescope is being constructed for deployment
at the NSF South Pole research station. The telescope is designed for
conducting large-area millimeter and sub-millimeter wave surveys
of faint, low contrast emission, as required to map primary and secondary anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background. To achieve the required sensitivity and resolution, the telescope design employs an off-axis primary with a 10 meter diameter clear aperture. The full aperture and the associated optics will have a combined surface accuracy of better than 20 microns rms to allow precision operation in the submillimeter atmospheric windows. The telescope will be surrounded with a large reflecting ground screen to reduce sensitivity to thermal emission from the ground and local interference. The optics of the telescope will support a degree field of view at 2mm wavelength and will feed a new 1000-element micro-lithographed planar bolometric array with superconducting transition-edge sensors and frequency-multiplexed readouts. The first key project will be to conduct a survey over &dbigwig;4000 degrees for galaxy clusters using the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich Effect. This survey should find many thousands of clusters with a mass selection criteria that is remarkably uniform with redshift. Armed with redshifts obtained from optical and infrared follow-up observations, it is expected that the survey will enable significant constraints to be placed on the equation of state of the dark energy.
We describe an "Origins Survey" that will provide a comprehensive picture of the era of galaxy formation and assembly. The survey data will allow us to develop and test models of when and how the first condensed objects in the universe are formed. We propose to do this by accumulating enough redshifts to have 10,000 galaxies of each of 20 types (defined empirically by the real state of galaxies) in each of 10 time zones of duration 1.5 Gyr each. Discounting the first two such zones which will be covered by the SDSS, the 2DF, and other surveys, our plan is to obtain redshifts for a total of 2 million galaxies. The hardware design is driven by the requirement to see the earliest galaxies (z ~ 10) and the capability to carry out this high z survey in an elapsed time of five years on a dedicated telescope. These considerations lead to a tentative design that uses a 20 - 40 meter diameter telescope with an Integral Field Unit (IFU) high-resolution spectrograph (R=6000 operating in the 1 - 2.5 micron spectral range. We require a 1 - 3 arc minute field of view with a modest adaptive-optics-corrected 0.2 arc-sec half power diameter point spread function (in the near-IR). Simultaneous, complementary observations will be made in the far-infrared/submm (350 - 850) microns to view the "hidden" starbursts known to exist from SCUBA data and the (non-CMB) infrared background. These observations require a low water vapor site. With appropriate instrumentation the same telescope can be used to study proto-planetary disks and star formation regions in the low z Universe. In this paper we present the scientific case for the survey, the basis for our requirements, and the results of our preliminary studies of how best to meet these goals.
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