The Euclid Science Performance Verification 3 meeting, March 2023
Authors: F. Bernardeau, P.-A. Frugier and H. Aussel (SPV3 leads)
From March 20 to March 23, a meeting dedicated to the third Science Performance Verification exercise (SPV3) took place at the Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris, France. Since the online kick-off meeting of the exercise, that took place in Feb. 17 2021, that was the first opportunity for key EC members of the SPV3 project to meet face to face. Unfortunately, in person participation was a bit hampered by the strike movements that affected Paris at that moment, but it was nonetheless a very lively meeting with up to 30 in person participants and about 10 to 20 online.
Let us recall that the general objectives of SPV3 are,
- to verify that the expected performances of the Euclid project are in line with the core science objectives of the nominal mission;
- to ensure the development and maintenance of tools and codes that can be used to make (quick) assessments on the evolution of the mission.
- to help the consortium gain insights into the critical parts of the project.
The objectives of the Paris meeting were more specifically focussed on
- the presentation of the current performance estimates and lessons learnt so far,
- the consolidation of the roadmap for the next level of results.
The meeting
Although the SPV3 exercise is focused on the core science, by nature it involves efforts from a large variety of EC teams, from the realisation of reference simulations, the evaluation of the performances of the Processing Functions of the Science Ground Segment (SGS) to the construction of dedicated analysis tools. The meeting was separated into two periods. It started with topical sessions, organised by different group leads on specific sub-topics (presentation of IST-NL and IST-L efforts, Galaxy Clustering spectroscopic End-to-End tools, presentation of the expected performances of the GC probe, of the Weak-Lensing and Galaxy photometric probe, Shear measurement performances, roadmap for the computation of covariances, etc.) A Parallel session specifically on Point Spread Function reconstruction was organised by P.A. Frugier on Tuesday morning. Furthermore, a call was also made within the SPV3 group for in or out of session contributions. These presentations were meant to prepare the second half of the meeting which was more specifically dedicated to discussion panels aiming to define a common roadmap and ensuring that all required resources, whether it is numerical simulations, SGS runs or specific tools, will be available in due time. It was also the opportunity for all people involved in the effort to share results and make sure that all aspects related to the evaluation of the mission performances have been addressed.
All presentations and documents are available from the redmine entry of the meeting,
https://euclid.roe.ac.uk/projects/spv03/wiki/20210317SPV3Paris_ (EC-internal only)
Conclusions from the meeting
The final discussion session aimed to consolidate the last part of the roadmap for completing the SPV3 exercise. To achieve this, dedicated tools need to be completed, and specific SPV3 mocks need to be run to provide a fair estimate of the performance of SGS key PFs. While a few issues remain unresolved, a sound and viable roadmap, together with the full definition of a new reference model for the mission, emerged from the discussions.
Apart from the SPV3 objectives, the meeting also provided an excellent opportunity for people from various groups, including SWGs, ISTs, and OUs, to share their experiences and challenges and to prepare themselves to the unprecedented challenges posed by the scientific analysis of the first Data Release.
