Euclid. II. The VIS Instrument

Understand

This paper presents the specification, design, and development of the Visible Camera (VIS) on the ESA Euclid mission.

• VIS is a large optical-band imager with a field of view of 0.54 deg^2 sampled at 0.1" with an array of 609 Megapixels and spatial resolution of 0.18".
• It will be used to survey approximately 14,000 deg^2 of extragalactic sky to measure the distortion of galaxies in the redshift range z=0.1-1.5 resulting from weak gravitational lensing, one of the two principal cosmology probes of Euclid.
• With photometric redshifts, the distribution of dark matter can be mapped in three dimensions, and, from how this has changed with look-back time, the nature of dark energy and theories of gravity can be constrained.