The European Space Agency’s ESA probe launched Saturday at 5:12 p.m. CEST aboard SpaceX Falcon 9 from Cape Canaveral, Florida. On Sunday, Euclid fired a thruster to put it on a path to the L2 Lagrange point, 1.5 billion kilometers from Earth. The probe is scheduled to arrive there in late July. Scientific operations will begin after the tests at the end of September.
From L2, where NASA’s James Webb telescope and the European Space Agency’s Gaia telescope are also located, Euclid will observe billions of galaxies within a radius of ten billion light years, taking high-resolution images at visible and infrared wavelengths. The goal is to decipher the two mysterious components of our universe: dark matter and dark energy. Dark matter cannot be detected directly, but affects visible matter through its gravity. Dark energy is a mysterious force that seems to cause space to expand faster.
Look into the past space
The ESA probe is designed to create the largest and most accurate 3D map of the universe. According to the European Space Agency, this should provide information about how matter is distributed over vast distances and how the expansion of the universe has progressed over cosmic history. Thus, astronomers can deduce the nature of dark energy and dark matter. Euclid should have looked into the past ten billion years.
The assignment is slated to last six years, with an option for a five-year extension. Euclid was built by Thales Alenia Space. Airbus is responsible for the payload module, which houses a 1.2 meter reflecting telescope, also developed by Airbus, and the accompanying instruments VIS (camera for the visible wavelength range) and NISP (spectrophotometer and near infrared photometer) are housed. NISP with NASA detectors comes from an international consortium led by Astrophysique Laboratories de Marseille. The VIS system was built by a consortium led by University College London’s Mullard Space Science Laboratory.
The European Space Operations Center (ESOC) in Darmstadt is responsible for mission control and communications with the spacecraft. For large amounts of data from Euclid — up to one terabyte per day — the European Space Agency’s Estrack network has been enhanced with deep-sea antennas. The data will be analyzed by the Euclid Consortium, a group of more than 2,000 scientists from more than 300 institutions in Europe, the United States, Canada and Japan.
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2023-07-04 08:00:23
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