Scientists arrived from Italy to see Euclid take off: “A piece of us flies into space”
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They have come all the way here, to Cape Canaveral, to see their “creature” fly. Even if they don’t call it that, as they describe the ten years spent dealing with the design and development of the space telescope which will shed light on that part of the Cosmos by definition “dark”, it is understood that it is a matter of “a piece of life that is now flying in space”. I am Anna Di Giorgio, Enrico Franceschi, Eduardo Medinaceli, Paola Battaglia and Luca Valenziano. Despite the distance (and Florida’s humid heat) they couldn’t pass up the opportunity to watch Euclid take off and they met here, to watch it together. They seem like a close team. Without too much anxiety, about now and how things will go after. They know that Euclid will do great things: “I couldn’t wait to be here – he begins Anna Di Giorgio, 64 years old, that is the Inaf project manager – I’ve already been there twice, the last time with ESA’s Herschel space telescope. I’m excited, and also a little anxious. Euclid has been a fixed thought for some time now, my husband occasionally asks me ‘are you there?’, because my mind is elsewhere”.
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In the ten years in which Euclid has turned from a project into a reality, the five of them, together with dozens of INAF scientists and engineers, have designed and written all the commands necessary to operate the two tools Vis and Nisp, and process the images, hundreds of terabytes of data that the telescope will send to Earth. The work has never stopped, not even in the last few days, they say, to review and correct the latest things, get back to the software: “Only now do we feel the emotion of seeing a part of us leaving the Earth” he says Paula Battle, 48 years old. She is Nisp operations managerof the operation in flight and hers is the task of intervening and correcting if something goes wrong: “I feel as excited as a child when Christmas evening arrives – she admits – each project is unique, satellites like this are prototypes and we see many years of work go up in those few seconds”.
“Like the First Day of School”
But there is no concern. There is rather the curiosity of watch a live launch of SpaceX. There is the assurance of the reliability of Elon Musk’s company and, above all, the work done in recent years. Valencian he is one of the ‘founders’ of this project: “Since before the first day” he underlines. He is in charge of the Italian contribution to the Nisp tool and coordinated the Italian contribution of the whole mission, and even if he has now changed jobs, he is still tied to his old role: “The reliability of these systems is such that there is a very low probability of failure, and then SpaceX has to do the work. As far as we are concerned, the work will start again when the instruments are turned on. But Euclid will work perfectly, better than it needed to be done”.
“It’s like the first day of school,” he reflects Enrico Franceschi, 56, who is the engineer of the five “caught up in this crazy world” he says with a smile. His task was to simulate the context ‘around’ the instrument, the same technological environment that he would have found in flight. He awaits the first data, the ‘first light’ that will enter Euclid’s eye: “The greatest emotion will be when the telemetry will come from up there instead of from the laboratory next to mine – he says – but after all these years of challenges and difficult situations, this for me is a moment of pause, of breath”.
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“Tomorrow it all starts”
Among the difficulties, they mention the beginning of the adventure, when infrared detectors were needed for the Nisp instrument and there seemed to be no money. “Then NASA came in, otherwise we wouldn’t have had the mission” recalls Valenciano. Or when during a test of the instrument, “the focal plane was only half working. And everyone turned to look at me”. He remembers it with a smile Eduardo Medinaceli, 47, arrived in Italy from Bolivia for a doctorate in particle physics, then turned to cosmology. “For Nisp he wrote 30,000 lines of on-board data processing code – exclaims Valenciano – if the detectors pull out the data it is thanks to him”. “I won’t watch the launch with my fingers crossed – says Medinaceli – we did our job well, there is always the possibility that something will go wrong, but I don’t believe in luck. Everything starts tomorrow”.
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Tomorrow is the future that they have been building for ten years and that they will see fly: “Each of us has signed a piece of the satellite in some way – Valenziano explains – we have had physical contact, maybe just tightening a screw, or leaving a fingerprint There’s a piece of you up there.” This is how all the effort is perceived, but spent with enthusiasm. “Guys, we have also bypassed a pandemic,” says Franceschi. Now it’s just waiting for something beautiful: “We will hold hands when it takes off, in excitement and happiness.”
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