Guardians of the Galaxies: Shielding EUCLID's Eyes from Cosmic Hazards

EUCLID is ESA's M2 mission to measure the dark universe more comprehensively than ever before, to answer some of the most fundamental questions that we have about our universe. Dr. Ben Dryer in the Centre for Electronic Imaging at the Open University has worked for the last decade on the instrumentation for one of the two scientific payloads on-board, the VISible instrument (VIS). Scientific imagers in space are subject to a harsh radiation environment which degrades the quality of images and therefore scientific data returned, and this is a major concern for EUCLID. Dr. Dryer will outline the scientific objectives of the EUCLID mission, the challenges that had to be overcome, and go on to discuss the work performed at the OU to enable VIS to return the best possible data for the longest possible time in the harsh radiation environment of space.