EUCLID’s very large telescope ALIGNMENT

Abstract

Euclid is a part of the European Space Agency Cosmic Vision Medium Class program. This mission's goal is to investigate the nature of dark energy, dark matter and gravity by observing the geometry of the Universe and the formation of structures over cosmological timescales.Euclid Payload Module (PLM) includes a large TMA Korsch telescope in Silicon Carbide (SiC),, feeding a visible imager (VIS) and a near-infrared spectrometer and photometer (NISP). Both instruments are mounted at their respective focal plane position.Airbus Defence & Space, as main industrial responsible for the PLM design and assembly, has been in charge of the integration, the alignment and the optical performance characterization of this 7 mirrors telescope.This paper describes how the alignment has been performed, with respect to the specified allocation for each mirror, and presents the performance results reached at the end of the alignment campaign.Thanks to his long experience in making cutting edge, highly performant telescope, Airbus has successfully reached all the specified performance requirements, thus enabling its prime customer, Thalès Alenia Space, to finalize and complete the assembly of the whole satellite.