Peacock2

EUCLID: ESA's Proposed Dark Energy Mission
John Peacock (University of Edinburgh)

The European Space Agency has a process named "Cosmic Vision" for future space missions in astronomy (and other areas of space science). The first experiment is expected to be a "Medium mission", to be launched in 2017. The budget is approximately 300M Euro from ESA, plus national contributions. One of the proposals competing for this slot is EUCLID: the names honours the pioneer of geometry, rather than being an acronym, and denotes the fact that it is a geometrical probe of dark energy. The mission aims to combine optical imaging of 20,000 deg^2 for gravitational lensing with slit spectroscopy of several x 10^8 galaxies, based on DMD technology, to measure Baryon Acoustic Oscillations.