Europe’s Euclid space telescope on Saturday blasted off on the first mission to shed light on two of the universe’s greatest mysteries: dark energy and dark matter.
“I can tell you, I’m so thrilled, I’m so excited to see this mission up in space,” European Space Agency (ESA) Director-General Josef Aschbacher said after the launch.
A Space Exploration Technologies Falcon 9 rocket carrying the telescope took off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, at 11:12am. Shortly after, once separated from the rocket, it emitted its first signal, as scheduled.
Photo: EPA-EFE
The agency was forced to turn to billionaire Elon Musk’s firm to launch the mission after Russia pulled its Soyuz rockets in response to sanctions over the war in Ukraine.
“The launch was perfect,” ESA Director of Science Carole Mundell said. “Now begins that journey.”
After a month-long trip through space, Euclid is to join the James Webb Space Telescope at a stable hovering spot around 1.5 million kilometers from Earth called the second Lagrange point.
From there, Euclid is to chart the largest-ever map of the universe, encompassing up to 2 billion galaxies across more than one-third of the sky.
By capturing light that has taken 10 billion years to reach Earth’s vicinity, the map would also offer a new view of the 13.8-billion-year-old universe’s history.
“We will unravel the mysteries of the dark universe,” Mundell said.
Scientists hope to use information gathered by Euclid to address what project manager Giuseppe Racca calls a “cosmic embarrassment”: that 95 percent of the universe remains unknown to humanity.
About 70 percent is thought to be made of dark energy, the name given to the unknown force that is causing the universe to expand at an accelerated rate.
Twenty-five percent is dark matter, thought to bind the universe together and make up about 80 percent of its mass.
“Ever since we could see stars we’ve wondered, is the universe infinite? What is it made out of? How does it work?” NASA Euclid project scientist Michael Seiffert said.
“It’s just absolutely amazing that we can take data and actually start to make even a little bit of progress on some of these questions,” he said.
Euclid consortium member Guadalupe Canas told a news conference ahead of the launch that the space telescope was a “dark detective,” which can reveal more about both elements.
Euclid, which is 4.7m tall and 3.5m wide, would use two scientific instruments to map the sky. Its visible light camera would let it measure the shape of galaxies, while its near-infrared spectrometer and photometer would allow it to measure how far away they are.
Euclid would try to spot things that cannot be seen by searching for their absence.
The light coming from billions of light years away is slightly distorted by the mass of visible and dark matter along the way, a phenomenon known as weak gravitational lensing.
“By subtracting the visible matter, we can calculate the presence of the dark matter which is in-between,” Racca said.
While this might not reveal the true nature of dark matter, scientists hope it would throw up new clues that would help track it down.
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