Good turnout for Euclid industry day at ESTEC
16 January 2014
ESA's European Space Research and Technology Centre, ESTEC, yesterday hosted more than 200 representatives of space industry at the spacecraft industry day for its Euclid mission. ESA and the Prime Contractor for Euclid, Thales Alenia Space, presented the mission, including its procurement plan and related business opportunities.
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| Participants at the Euclid Spacecraft Industry Day at ESA's European Space Research and Technology Centre, the Netherlands. Credit: ESA - A. Le Floc'h |
Named after the Greek mathematician Euclid of Alexandria, Euclid is a mission to study some of the most mysterious constituents of the Universe: dark matter and dark energy. The spacecraft is designed to map the geometry of the dark Universe by investigating the distance-redshift relationship and the evolution of cosmic structures.
ESA’s Science Programme Committee selected Euclid as the second Medium-class mission under the Cosmic Vision 2015-2025 plan in October 2011; the mission was formally adopted in June 2012. It is planned for launch in 2020 and will orbit around the second Sun-Earth Lagrange point (L2) situated 1.5 million km from Earth.
Responsibility for the mission design and implementation, as well as procurement of the launch services, lies with ESA. Astrium SAS Toulouse (now part of the Airbus Group) was picked to be the subcontractor for the payload module in December 2012, and Thales Alenia Space was selected as the mission’s Prime Contractor in June 2013. The Euclid Consortium, consisting of more than one hundred scientific institutes, is responsible for the development and delivery of the spacecraft’s instruments and the scientific data processing.
The industry day is an important milestone in the mission’s full industrial implementation. Participants were provided an opportunity to be briefed on the progress of the mission, its system design, programmatics, procurement approach and the Invitation To Tender (ITT) plan. Each ITT was presented by the Prime Contractor Thales Alenia Space and discussed in detail. Splinter meetings were organised by subsystem groups with the interested industries. The agenda for the day and the presentation files can be downloaded here (pdf file, 7.5MB).
