Headshot photo Welcome to the eROSITA-DE science portal!

eROSITA (extended ROentgen Survey with an Imaging Telescope Array) is a wide-field X-ray telescope on-board the Russian-German "Spectrum-Roentgen-Gamma" (SRG) observatory, and it was developed under the leadership of the Max-Planck Institute for extraterrestrial Physics (MPE) in Germany (DE). eROSITA is a sensitive X-ray telescope capable of delivering deep, sharp images over very large areas of the sky in the energy range ~0.2-8 keV. The eROSITA telescope consists of seven identical Wolter-1 mirror modules. Each module contains 54 nested mirror shells to meet the required sensitivity. A novel detector system has been developed by MPE based on of the successful XMM-Newton pn-CCD technology.

SRG was successfully launched from Baikonur on July 13 2019, and placed in a halo orbit around the L2 point. From mid-September until mid-December 2019, eROSITA carried out its Calibration and Performance Verification (Cal-PV) program. Since December 2019, SRG/eROSITA has been performing an all-sky survey, in which the whole celestial sphere is mapped once every six months. Eight such all-sky charts are planned until December 2023.

The design-driving science of eROSITA is the detection of very large samples (~100,000 objects) of galaxy clusters out to redshifts z >1, in order to study the large scale structure in the Universe, test and characterize cosmological models including Dark Energy. eROSITA is also expected to yield a sample of several million Active Galactic Nuclei, including both obscured and un-obscured objects, providing a unique view of the evolution of supermassive black holes within the emerging cosmic structure. The survey will also provide new insights into a wide range of astrophysical phenomena, including accreting binaries, active stars and diffuse emission within the Galaxy, as well as solar system bodies that emit X-rays via the charge exchange process. Finally, such a deep imaging survey at high spectral resolution, with its scanning strategy sensitive to a range of variability timescales from tens of seconds to years, will undoubtedly open up a vast discovery space for the study of rare, unpredicted, or unpredictable high-energy astrophysical phenomena.

This web portal offers general information about the eROSITA instrument, the German eROSITA Consortium (eROSITA-DE), the eROSITA scanning strategy and the released eROSITA data and software.






Public eROSITA Page
General public: learn about the eROSITA telescope and get the latest news and updates.
Early Data Release Data Release 1
The German eROSITA Consortium makes public the observations obtained during the Calibration and Performance Verification (Cal-PV) program. Access here to get the data and software to analyse it! On 31. January 2024 the German eROSITA Consortium made public the observations obtained during the first eROSITA All-Sky Survey (eRASS 1). Access here to get the data and software to analyse it!
Future releases Special releases
In the near future, eROSITA-DE will release the German eROSITA All-Sky Survey (eRASS) data. Learn here the expected dates. The eROSITA members make public the data used in some of their published works.
HiPS expoure maps eROSITA Publications
Do you want to learn about the progress of the all-sky survey performed by eROSITA? Access here to the continuously updated exposure maps of the individual surveys. The German eROSITA Consortium has several scientific publications. Access here for getting a complete list of them.
Team Visibility tool
Know the people behind each Science Working Group in the German eROSITA Consortium. Get in touch with them if you would like to collaborate on the project. Learn about the general eROSITA/SRG mission planning. Tools to check past and future survey scanning times are also available.
Clock Internal pages
eROSITA data is stored in units of eROdays (4 hrs). Use this tool to check the corresponding (human-readable) time. This page is only available for members of the German eROSITA Consortium. If you are a member and want to get access, please revise the Newcomers section in the main eROSITA Wiki.