In five places millions of kilometers from our planet there are Lagrangian points. They are regions of space where scientists have found that the combined gravitational force of one massive body (like Earth) orbiting another body (like the Sun) is balanced by the centrifugal force required to move it along.
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In simple terms: they are ideal points for objects with very small masses, for example spaceships, stay there, and move by the action of these forces, which does not mean spending a lot of energy.
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In particular, the Lagrange point 2 (L2) – 1.5 million km from our planet, located directly on the line of the Earth and the Sun – today houses powerful space telescopes, through which humanity, like James Webb, unearths the mysteries of the universe. Gaia, and its most recent addition, Euclid, the European Space Agency, are in the process of joining them to begin transmitting science data today.
Although they are in similar locations, they are space observatories with different capabilities, dimensions, and goals that hope to reconstruct different parts of the history of the universe.
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James Webb
This week the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) completes a year, offering global images and measurements of the universe like we’ve never seen before, capable of only the most powerful observatory of its kind ever launched into space.
Webb is NASA’s primary space science laboratory and the result of a collaboration between the European Space Agency (ESA) and Canada (CSA). It was designed to take advantage of results obtained from other spacecraft, such as the Space Telescope. Hubble and the Spitzer Space Telescope; Unlike the first, which observes the universe in visible and ultraviolet light, the JWST focuses on the infrared, a wavelength critical to observing distant objects through gas and dust.
Thanks to this and its large size (it has a primary mirror with a diameter of 6 meters), the Web allows scientists to explore the entire universe, from planets to stars, passing through nebulae and galaxies, to discover the secrets of the distant universe. . the nearest exoplanets.
Besides, the JWST has begun a new exploration of the planets of our solar system and to search for the fine details and faint signals of the first galaxies that ever formed.
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It is an ESA mission launched in 2013 with the goal of creating a more accurate and complete multidimensional map. Milky Way, which will help astronomers reconstruct the past (and future) evolution of our galaxy over billions of years. The program produced three deliveries last year.
Gaia’s mission is to complete the mission, and it is equipped with a 1 billion-pixel camera, optical telescopes, and a spectrometer. Hipparchus (1989), the first satellite to plot the positions of stars. Thanks to the fact that the collecting area of Gaia’s primary mirrors captures 30 times more light than its predecessor, it allows for more sensitive and precise measurements.
Euclid
Although not as large as the Web, it has outstanding qualities, launched by the European Space Agency on July 1, capable of recording data from a wide field of view. It is expected to collect more data in just a few days than Hubble has collected in its 32 years of service.
A six-year mission, seeking to create the largest and most accurate 3D map of the universe ever, charts the locations of billions of galaxies, where they are now, and where they have been in the past. This is to try to figure out how matter and dark energy have evolved over history.
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