The European Space Agency’s Euclid spacecraft is on its mission to chart the history of the universe dating back 10 billion years.
The map created by the spacecraft, named after the Greek mathematician known as the father of geometry, will be used to explore what dark matter and dark energy – mysterious matter that makes up 95 percent of our universe – influence what. we see when we look across space and time.
The Euclid telescope was launched.
The Euclid mission lifted off at 11:12 am Eastern time aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral, Fla. The rocket entered its planned orbit almost nine minutes after launch. It will complete additional orbital maneuvers before the space telescope separates and begins its journey of more than a million miles to its final destination.
ESA plans to launch the spacecraft on a Russian Soyuz rocket or on the new Ariane 6 rocket. But due to a break in European-Russian space relations after the invasion of Ukraine, and delays for Ariane 6, ESA transferred some launches to SpaceX, including Euclid.
What is the Euclid mission?
The Euclid space telescope aims to explore how dark matter and dark energy shape the universe across space and time. In near-infrared and visible wavelengths, the mission will record more than a third of the sky over the next six years, peering into the past to observe galaxies as young as four billion years. year.
Unlike the Hubble and James Webb Space Telescopes, which focus closely on one part of the sky at a time, scientists will use Euclid to cover vast swathes of the extragalactic sky at once. In three of the regions it records, Euclid goes back further, describing the structure of the universe about a billion years after the Big Bang.
What is dark matter and dark energy?
Dark matter — an invisible type of matter that does not emit, absorb or reflect light — has so far eluded direct detection. But scientists know it exists because of its gravitational influence on galaxies moving through the universe. Maps of the universe created using data from the Euclid space telescope will reveal how dark matter is distributed in space and time by the way it slightly blocks the light from the galaxies behind it. This is an effect known as weak gravitational lensing.
Euclid will also study dark energy, which is a more mysterious force that acts like the opposite of gravity: Instead of pushing things together, it pushes them apart – especially since our universe is expanding at such a rapid rate.
Scientists hope that with Euclid’s data, they can test whether Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity behaves differently on cosmological scales. That may have something to do with the nature of dark energy: whether it’s a constant force in the universe, or a dynamic one with time-varying properties — which will change fundamental physics as we know it. scientist. Such a discovery may even shed light on the ultimate fate of what appears to be our expanding universe.
What instruments will fly on the Euclid spacecraft?
The mission hosts a visible imager consisting of a 600-megapixel camera that can photograph an area as large as two full moons’ worth of sky at a time. With this instrument, scientists can glean how the shapes of galaxies are distorted by the dark matter in front of them.
Euclid also has a near-infrared spectrometer and photometer for measuring each galaxy’s redshift, or the wavelength-stretching effect that occurs in light arriving from the distant cosmos. When used in conjunction with ground-based instruments, they can convert redshift to height to determine the distances of each galaxy.
Where is Euclid going?
After Euclid explodes, it will travel nearly a million miles from our planet to orbit the so-called second Lagrange point, or L2. At L2, the gravitational pulls of the Earth and sun cancel out. This location strategically placed Euclid in a place to make an extensive survey of the sky without Earth or the moon blocking its view. The James Webb Space Telescope orbits L2 for the same reason.
It will take a month for the spacecraft to arrive, and another three months to test the performance of Euclid’s instruments before it starts sending data back to Earth for scientists to analyze.
