EUCLID's Near Infrared Spectro-Photometer ready for flight - review of final performances

ESA's mission Euclid while undertaking its final integration stage is fully qualified. Euclid will perform an extra galactic survey (0<2) using visible and near-infrared light. To detect the infrared radiation is equipped with the Near Infrared Spectro-Photometer (NISP) instrument with a sensitivity in the 0.9-2 mu m range. We present an illustration of the NISP Data Processing Unit's Application Software, highlighting the experimental process to obtain the final parametrization of the on-board processing of data produced by an array of 16 Teledyne's HAWAII-2RG (HgCdTe) - each of 2048x2048 px(2), 0.3 arcsec/px, 18 mu m pixel pitch; using data from the latest test campaigns done with the flight configuration hardware - complete optical system (Korsh anastigmat telescope), detectors array (0.56 deg2 firld of view) and readout systems (16 Digital Control Units and Sidecar ASICs). Also, we show the outstanding Spectrometric (using a Blue and two Red Grisms) and Photometric (using YE 0.92-1.15 mu m, J(E) 1.15-1.37 mu m, and H-E 1.37-2.0 mu m filters) performances of the NISP detector derived from the end-to-end payload module test campaign at FOCAL 5 - CSL; among them the Photometric Point Spread Function (PSF) determination, and the Spectroscopic dispersion verification. Also the performances of the on-board processing are presented. Then, we describe the solution of a major issue found during this final test phase that put NISP in the critical path. We will describe how the problem was eventually understood and solved thanks to an intensive coordinated effort of an independent review team (tiger team lead by ESA) and a team of NISP experts from the Euclid Consortium. An extended PLM level campaign in ambient in Liege and a dedicated test campaign conducted in Marseille on the NISP EQM model, with both industrial and managerial support, finally confirmed the correctness of the diagnosis of the problem. Finally, the Euclid's survey is presented (14000 deg(2) wide survey, and similar to 40 deg(2) deep-survey) as well as the global statistics for a mission lifetime of 6 years (similar to 1.5 billion Galaxy's shapes, and similar to 50 million Galaxy's spectra).

Automated summary

This article introduces the final integration stage of the Euclid mission and the performance and processing of NISP. The article also describes the solution to a critical issue discovered during the final test phase, and presents the survey scope and statistical data of Euclid.