Two business units of Teledyne Technologies Inc., including one based in Camarillo, are providing the visible and infrared detectors aboard the Euclid dark universe space astrophysics mission.
Developed by the European Space Agency, the Euclid mission was scheduled to be launched on July 1 from Cape Canaveral.
James Beletic, president of Teledyne Imaging Sensors, one of the two business units of Teledyne, the Thousand Oaks-based aerospace, marine and digital imaging manufacturer, said the company was proud to supply the high-performance detectors to the mission.
“We are honored to contribute to this important mission that will advance our understanding of the universe,” Beletic said in a statement.
The other Teledyne business unit contributing to the mission is Teledyne e2v Space Imaging. It produced the 36 charge-coupled devices that make up the visible wavelength camera’s focal plane.
Euclid will explore the evolution of the dark universe, constructing a three-dimensional map by observing billions of galaxies out to 10 billion light-years, according to Teledyne.
While dark energy accelerates the expansion of the universe and dark matter governs the growth of cosmic structures, scientists do not know what dark energy and dark matter are. By observing how the universe evolved over the past 10 billion years, astronomers can infer the properties of dark matter and dark energy to reveal more about their precise nature, the company said.
Euclid has a 1.2 meter-diameter telescope that is designed to work at both visible and near-infrared wavelengths. The telescope will collect light from distant cosmic objects and feed it to two instruments: the visible wavelength camera and a near-infrared spectrometer and photometer, the company said.
The two instruments work in parallel and observe the same region of the sky during each exposure. Each instrument has a field of view about 2.8 times larger than the full moon, enabling Euclid to measure more than a third of the sky during its planned six-year mission.
The Euclid instrument was delivered by an international consortium coordinated by France, with partners from Italy, Germany, Spain, Denmark, Norway, and the United States.
When Euclid launches, its near-infrared spectrometer and photometer will be the largest infrared focal plane mosaic operating in space, the company said, adding the H2RGs were produced by Teledyne Imaging Sensors in Camarillo.
The imaging-sensors business unit also produced the Sidecar (system image, digitizing, enhancing, controlling, and retrieving) Asic (Application Specific Integrated Circuit), a complementary metal oxide semiconductor chip that operates Euclid’s H2RG arrays and digitizes the image data.
Teledyne had previously provided 15 infrared detectors for use on three of the four science instruments aboard the James Webb Space Telescope, which launched into orbit in December 2021.
In 2027, NASA will launch its next flagship astrophysics mission, the Roman Space Telescope, for which Teledyne recently delivered the infrared detectors.