The European Space Agency (ESA) is Europe’s gateway to space. Its mission is to shape the development of Europe’s space capability and ensure that investment in space continues to deliver benefits to the citizens of Europe and the world.
Find out more about space activities in our 23 Member States, and understand how ESA works together with their national agencies, institutions and organisations.
Exploring our Solar System and unlocking the secrets of the Universe
Go to topicProtecting life and infrastructure on Earth and in orbit
Go to topicUsing space to benefit citizens and meet future challenges on Earth
Go to topicMaking space accessible and developing the technologies for the future
Go to topicThank you for liking
You have already liked this page, you can only like it once!
Euclid’s Near-Infrared Spectrometer and Photometer (NISP) instrument is dedicated to measuring the amount of light that galaxies emit at each wavelength. It will image the sky in infrared light (900–2000 nm) to measure the brightness and intensity of light. This image was taken during commissioning of Euclid to check that the focused instrument worked as expected.
This is a raw image taken using NISP’s ‘Y’ filter. Because it is largely unprocessed, some unwanted artefacts remain – for example the cosmic rays that shoot straight across. The Euclid Consortium will ultimately turn the longer-exposed survey observations into science-ready images that are artefact-free, more detailed, and razor sharp.
The image on the left shows the full NISP field of view, with the zoom-in on the right (4% of NISP’s full field of view) demonstrating the extraordinary level of detail that NISP is already achieving. We see spiral and elliptical galaxies, nearby and distant stars, star clusters, and much more. But the area of sky that it covers is actually only about a quarter of the width and height of the full Moon.
Euclid’s telescope collected light for 100 seconds to enable NISP to create this image. During nominal operation, it is expected to collect light for roughly five times longer, unveiling many more distant galaxies.
Before it reaches the detector, NISP sends incoming light through either a photometry filter or a spectrometry grism. In this image, the light from Euclid’s telescope has passed through the photometry filter.