The European Space Telescope has launched on a million-mile journey to map the dark universe.
The Euclid Space Telescope, named after the ancient Greek mathematician, will spend six years venturing through space, observing billions of galaxies.
It blasted off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket at 4.12pm UK time on Saturday and is expected to take a month to reach its destination – a so-called second launch. The space region of the Grangian point.
Artist’s image shows the Euclid Space Telescope in space.Image: European Space Agency/Reuters
This is a stable position for the spacecraft because the gravitational pull of the Earth and the Sun are roughly equal.
The UK provided £37 million for the £850 million mission, and scientists played a key role in the design and construction of the two-tonne probe and led one of the two science instruments on board, the Visible Imager ( VIS), which will be the largest camera ever sent into space.
Another instrument is the near-infrared spectrometer and photometer developed in France.
Dr Paul Bate, chief executive of the UK Space Agency, said: “Watching Euclid launch, I was inspired by the years of hard work by thousands of people involved in space science missions and the fundamental importance of discovery – How we begin to understand and explore the universe.”
Scientists hope the mission will unravel two of the universe’s biggest mysteries: dark energy, the name for the mysterious force that causes the rate at which the universe’s expansion speeds up over time, and dark matter — particles that don’t absorb, reflect or emit light.
According to NASA, about 68 percent of the universe is dark energy, while dark matter makes up about 27 percent. “The rest — everything on Earth, everything we observe with all our instruments, all normal matter — adds up to less than 5 percent of the universe.”
Euclid is pinned to SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket
The Euclid mission aims to take a closer look at the dark universe to better understand why it is rapidly expanding.
It will exploit a cosmic phenomenon called gravitational lensing, in which matter acts like a magnifying glass, bending and distorting light from galaxies and star clusters behind it to capture high-quality images.
European Space Agency chief Joseph Aschbach said of Euclid’s successful liftoff: “I can tell you the atmosphere is amazing, we have a mission…
“It’s a really exciting moment to see this mission now fly to its destination and then of course make all these measurements of dark energy and dark matter that fascinate us and we have a lot of questions that are being answered with this data.”
More than 2,000 scientists across Europe were involved in the mission, from design to construction and analysis.