Elon Musk’s SpaceX successfully launched the Euclid space observatory, developed by the European Space Agency (ESA) with the participation of the US Space Agency (NASA). The Falcon 9 launch vehicle from the observatories was launched on July 1 from the spaceport at Cape Canaveral in the US state of Florida.
According to the European Space Agency, the main goal of Euclid will be to study the composition and evolution of the “dark universe”.
It is planned that by August the spacecraft will cover one and a half million kilometers and reach the Lagrange point L2 on the opposite side of the Sun. The James Webb Orbital Infrared Observatory, the world’s largest space telescope, currently operates there.
The authors of the Euclid mission said that with the help of data obtained using the new telescope, they will be able to explore the dark Universe and “reveal the great cosmic mystery of dark matter and dark energy.”
The space telescope will create the largest and most accurate 3D map of the universe in space and time, observing billions of galaxies up to 10 billion light-years away in more than a third of the sky. explained в ESA.
Scientists hope that Euclid will allow them to see how the Universe expanded and how large-scale cosmic structures are distributed in space and time, learn more about the role of gravity and the nature of dark energy and dark matter.
