JAKARTA – The European Space Agency’s (ESA) Euclid telescope, designed to explore the vast and dark universe, has now arrived at its destination orbit, Lagrange Sun-Earth 2 (L2).
To get to L2, the Euclid Telescope has to travel 1.5 million kilometers from Earth which takes one month after its launch on July 1.
In orbit L2, Euclid joins the James Webb Telescope and the Gaia mission. By the time the Euclid Telescope has completed one full revolution around L2, the Moon will have circled Earth six times.
The area around L2 is large, so lots of space and collisions are easily avoided. The Webb and Gaia telescopes are between 400,000 and 1,100,000 kilometers away, depending on where they are in their respective orbits.
Furthermore, L2 is about four times farther from the Moon, offering the perfect vantage point for studying the Universe.
Where the Sun, Earth and Moon will be directly behind the Euclid Telescope at all times, so as not to interfere with observations.
Meanwhile, the telescope will get a clear view into space and point the antenna back to Earth to maintain communication with the ESA team.
Eculid would later explore the composition and evolution of the dark universe. The telescope will create the largest, most accurate 3D map of the universe across time and space by observing billions of galaxies up to 10 billion light years away, and exploring more than a third of the sky.
The telescope will explore how the universe is expanding, find out its large-scale structure distributed across space and time, reveal more about the role of gravity and the universal nature of energy and dark matter.
From there, ESA astronomers can deduce the nature of dark energy, dark matter, and gravity, to reveal more about their precise properties.
Between one and three months after launch, Euclid will go through several calibrations and scientific performance tests and prepare for its science mission. The telescope began its initial phase of surveying the universe three months after launch.
Tag: space telescope
2023-07-31 19:05:00
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