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K-State Today

June 3, 2015

Physics faculty member granted membership in European Space Agency Consortium

Submitted by Kim Coy

Lado Samushia, assistant professor of physics, has been selected for membership in the Euclid Consortium, a team responsible for a space mission to map the dark energy and dark matter in the universe.

Around 1,000 European scientists and engineers are working on Euclid mission. Samushia is one of few U.S. scientists chosen to be part of 43-member U.S. team being led by scientist Jason Rhodes of Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

"Measuring properties of the universe and understanding the nature of dark energy requires collaborative effort of thousands of scientists around the globe," Samushia said. "I'm honored and excited to be part of one of the biggest cosmology space mission of next decade."

Euclid is a European Space Agency all-sky space mission that will map the geometry of the universe from now to 10 billion years back. The telescope is scheduled to launch in 2020 where it will spend six years mapping locations and measuring the shapes of at least 2 billion galaxies spread over more than one-third of the sky.

Euclid aims to measure the expansion of the universe and the growth of structure with unprecedented accuracy in order to allow researchers to study properties of dark energy, dark matter, gravity and the initial conditions of the universe.