ESA award for team involving IA researchers

The Euclid mission consortium, one of the major missions of the European Space Agency (ESA), awarded the Euclid STAR 2020 prize in the "Team" category to one of the consortium groups that includes Portuguese participation and the Institute of Astrophysics (IA).

As part of the mission, the Euclid Survey Group (ECSURV) was formed in 2012 and has had Portuguese participation since the beginning, currently including four members from IA, in addition to 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 for launch in 2022. The ECSURV group is tasked with producing the sky mapping calendar, with around 40,000 observations from the Euclid telescope, defining which region of the sky it will observe at any given moment during the more than six years of the mission.

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

These awards began in 2017 and are symbolic in nature, recognizing exceptional contributions to the mission made by consortium members or groups each year. The awards were also given in the categories of student, junior engineer, junior scientist, senior member, and coordination.