The European spacecraft started on Saturday on its one million mile journey into outer space.
The aim of the space telescope’s six-year mission is to understand the nature of dark matter and dark energy, for which it will create a high-quality map of the spatial distribution of galaxies from one third of the sky.
Euclid was launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida on Saturday and will arrive at its destination in a month.
Named after the ancient Greek mathematician Euclid from Alexandria, the two-tonne spacecraft is moving towards the second Langrange point, at which the mass attraction of the Earth and the Sun is the same, so the position of the space telescope will be stable.
Great Britain contributed 37 million pounds (16 billion forints) to the 850 million pound mission.
The member states of the European Space Agency, which decide on the mission, the scientific community that defines the framework of the mission, more than a hundred European companies that contributed to its creation, and partners from the United States also participated in the creation of the telescope, said Josef Aschbacher, ESA Director General.
Two thousand scientists from all over Europe participated in the mission, from planning to construction to analysis.
2023-07-01 19:12:22
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