European Space Agency’s (ESA) Euclid spacecraft lifted off on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, USA on 1 July 2023.
Key points
- The mission aims to uncover the nature of two mysterious components of our Universe: dark matter and dark energy, and to help us answer the fundamental question: what is the Universe made of?
- Euclid will create a cosmic map that covers almost a third of the sky, charting the location of millions of galaxies and measuring the average spacing between them – one indicator of dark energy’s influence.
- Because the light from distant objects takes time to reach us, Euclid will observe galaxies as they were when the universe was about 3 billion years old.
- By also looking at closer galaxies, the mission will track how dark energy’s effect has changed over time.
- Euclid will also study dark energy by mapping the presence of another mysterious cosmic phenomenon called dark matter.
- While dark matter does not absorb or reflect light, scientists can detect it via its gravitational influence on “regular” matter like stars and galaxies, and its distribution throughout the cosmos is affected by dark energy’s outward push.
- To achieve its ambitious scientific goal, Euclid is equipped with a 1.2 m reflecting telescope that feeds the two innovative scientific instruments: VIS, which takes very sharp images of galaxies over a large fraction of the sky, and NISP, which can analyse galaxies’ infrared light by wavelength to accurately establish their distance.
