ESA awards team with IA researchers

The Euclid mission consortium, one of the European Space Agency's(ESA) major missions, has awarded the Euclid STAR 2020 prize in the "Team" category to one of the consortium's groups, which includes Portuguese participation and the Instituto de Astrofísica (IA).

As part of the mission, the survey group (Euclid Survey Group - ECSURV) was formed in 2012 and has had Portuguese participation since the beginning, currently including four members from IA, as well as nine other members from Italy and France. The group was nominated for the Euclid STAR 2020 - Teams award by the Euclid consortium community, which brings together around 1,500 members from 14 European countries, the United States and Canada.

The Euclid mission consists of a telescope that will penetrate the dark side of the Universe and is scheduled to be launched in 2022. The ECSURV group has the task of producing the sky mapping calendar, with the 40,000 or so observations of the Euclid telescope, defining which region of the sky it will observe at each moment during the more than six years of the mission.

Participation in this European mission was supported by the FCT and, more recently, by the PT SPACE Agency.

These awards began in 2017 and are symbolic in nature, annually recognizing exceptional contributions to the mission made by members or groups of the consortium. Prizes have also been awarded in the categories of student, junior engineer, junior scientist, senior member and coordination.