Airbus reports progress on Euclid space telescope

The Euclid mission aims to map the geometry of the “dark universe” – the regions which are too cold to emit visible light. Its telescope, the most complex that Airbus has ever designed and built, according to Philippe Pham, head of Earth observation, navigation and science at Airbus, is made entirely of silicon carbide, a technology which the company employed in the building of the telescope for Herschel, a spacecraft active between 2009 and 2013 and at the time, the largest infrared telescope ever built.

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“With the ultimate goal to understand the origin of the Universe’s accelerating expansion, Euclid will map the geometry of the dark universe with unprecedented accuracy,” said mission project manager Giuseppe Racca. The spacecraft, operating at temperatures of 100K, will collect a different high resolution image every 80 minutes for six years.

The module currently being constructed at Airbus Space and Defence’s facility in Toulouse has three primary features: the main telescope, a 1.2m diameter mirror and a three-mirror Korsch telescope, a type of instruments designed to be free from the optical aberrations incurred by telescopes with only one mirror. Korsch telescopes are capable of a wider field of view than single-mirror types and on Euclid, will supply light to two scientific instruments that will analyse the wavelengths and provide information about the composition of the objects it is observing. Like all space telescopes, its assembly requires extreme accuracy and clean conditions: the precision required for mechanical assembly is in microns, and for optical alignment in nanometres.