Penn Cosmologists Nominated by NASA for 2020 Euclid Mission

Gary Bernstein, Reese W. Flower Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics, and Bhuvnesh Jain, Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor in the Natural Sciences, both in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, have been tapped by NASA to join the European Space Agency's planned Euclid mission, named after a space telescope designed to probe the mysteries of dark energy and dark matter and scheduled to launch in 2020. Euclid will observe up to 2 billion galaxies occupying more than one-third of the sky, with the goal of better understanding the contents of the universe.

“The pristine conditions in space will allow Euclid to take pictures with exquisite clarity, which is evident if you’ve seen images from Hubble Space Telescope,” Jain said. “But Euclid can take pictures faster than Hubble and get infrared images which are simply impossible to obtain from the ground.”

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