The cost to Esa of building, launching and operating Euclid is expected to be just over 600m euros (£480m; $760m). Member states will provide Euclid's visible wavelength camera and a near-infrared camera/spectrometer, taking the likely cost of the whole endeavour beyond 800m euros.The US has been offered, and will accept, a junior role in the mission valued at around 5%. The American space agency (Nasa) will pay for this by picking up the tab for the infrared detectors needed on Euclid. A memorandum of understanding to this effect will be signed between the agencies in due course."We have negotiated a detailed text with Nasa, which both parties consider final, and it is ready for signature," said Dr Fabio Favata, Esa's head of science planning. "It will mean a small, commensurate number of US scientists will be welcomed into the Euclid Consortium," he told BBC News.The consortium is the team that will have access to Euclid's data.
The scientific push on Euclid’s behalf was so great that ESA agreed to accept the mission even though its cost to ESA — 606 million euros ($788 million) in 2012 economic conditions — is far higher than the nominal budget of 475 million euros that ESA had set for so-called Medium-class science missions. Just as much of a concern when the SPC adopted Euclid in October was whether key ESA member states, notably France, Britain and Italy, would be able to commit to providing the observing instruments and the various ground centers that Euclid will need. ESA has estimated that the instruments to be provided by national European agencies and laboratories are valued at around 150 million euros. A similar amount will be needed for Euclid’s elaborate ground network, including eight data centers distributed around Europe. Given these uncertainties — and to leave time to assure that Euclid’s design could be accommodated by a Soyuz rocket — the SPC gave itself until June to verify the mission. That waiting period pushed the scheduled launch from 2019 to 2020 but otherwise the project’s estimated cost has not changed in the past year, Rene Laureijs, ESA’s Euclid project scientist, said in a June 20 interview.
The overall optical design for the near-infrared spectrometer and photometer (NISP) and the lenses of the instrument will be developed and provided by the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching, near Munich. Shown here is an optical lens holder during the first test.
The European Space Agency, ESA, has chosen Thales Alenia Space to build the new Euclid cosmology satellite in a contract worth €322.5 million.
ESA's selection of the satellite prime contractor follows its choice of the contractor for the payload module (PLM assigned to Astrium SAS of Toulouse)
Euclid, ESA’s dark Universe mission, has passed its preliminary design review, providing confidence that the spacecraft and its payload can be built. It’s time to start ‘cutting metal’.
WASHINGTON — Problems with infrared detectors provided by NASA will delay a European Space Agency astronomy mission, potentially by a year or more, a NASA official said Oct. 18.Paul Hertz, director of NASA’s astrophysics division, said engineers found problems during recent testing of infrared detectors being provided by NASA for ESA’s Euclid space telescope, which had been planned for launch in 2020 on a Soyuz rocket from French Guiana.“The detector systems that we had been developing for delivery for ESA has been failing in their characterization testing before delivery,” he said at a meeting of the Astrophysics Advisory Committee.
