UK scientists win £3.6m space exploration grant
Posted on 20. Jul, 2010 by admin in Cosmology, Technology
The UK Space Agency has awarded £3.65m to help UK scientists, including cosmologists at the University of Portsmouth, prepare to compete for funding for three new space missions.
The initial funding aims to help scientists unlock the secrets of the Sun, seek out distant planets that could harbour life, and search for dark energy – the elusive constituent thought to make up 74 per cent of the mass-energy in the Universe.
Cosmologists at Portsmouth’s Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation (ICG) will be working on the mission named Euclid. This was selected from more than 50 original ideas to go forward for detailed technical and cost assessments.
The other two missions are called PLATO and Solar Orbiter. The three missions are part of the European Space Agency’s Cosmic Vision Programme and the agency will decide in June 2011 which two of the three to build and launch between 2017 and 2020.
Professor David Wands, acting director of ICG, said: “This is great for UK science and the University of Portsmouth. Being part of such international missions allows our scientists to play on the international stage and be innovative and work on the most exciting science.”
Euclid would address key questions relevant to fundamental physics and cosmology including the nature of the mysterious dark energy and dark matter.
Current theory suggests that these substances dominate the ordinary matter of stars and planets. In particular, dark energy has been proposed to explain the observation made by astronomers last decade that – contrary to expectations – the Universe is expanding faster now compared to billions of years ago.
Euclid would effectively look back in time about 10 billion years, covering the period over which dark energy seems to have accelerated the expansion of the Universe, and map the distribution of galaxies to reveal the underlying ‘dark’ architecture of the cosmos.
Euclid would use two different methods to build its map. One of the methods – weak gravitational lensing – maps the dark matter and measures dark energy by measuring the distortions of galaxy images. The other method involves studying baryonic acoustic oscillations – wiggle patterns, imprinted in the clustering of galaxies, which provide a standard against which to measure dark energy and expansion in the Universe.
If selected for development, Portsmouth scientists will work with their partners in eight other universities — University College London, Durham, the Institute for Astronomy in Edinburgh, UK ATC, Oxford, Hertfordshire, the Open University and the University of Cambridge.
