ESA‘s pioneering Euclid mission has recently passed its critical design review. The review verified that the overall mission architecture and detailed design of all its elements is complete and able to perform well together in order to accomplish the mission’s goals. Further to this key milestone validating the entire project – ranging from the spacecraft development over the launch and operations to the observational methods and data analysis strategy – the final assembly, integration and testing of the spacecraft flight model can start.

Named after the ancient Greek mathematician Euclid of Alexandria, ESA’s medium class astronomy and astrophysics Space mission Euclid will explore the nature of dark matter and dark energy in order to understand the origin of the universe and the reason of its accelerating expansion. Scheduled for launch from Europe’s Spaceport in Kourou (French Guiana), Euclid will observe thousands of millions of galaxies over the past 10 billion light years.

This 6-year mission will require extremely accurate measurements and represent an amazingly huge volume of images and data of different kinds, which means that data processing will be a critical part of the Euclid mission.
A real challenge, which SPACEBEL has been proud to take up. Since March 2015, SPACEBEL has been developing the Euclid Control and Data Management Unit Application Software under the responsibility of Thales Alenia Space Italy.