Euclid Goes to Space; Goal: Mapping the Universe from 10 Billion Years Ago

A SpaceX rocket has been prepared for launch in Florida on Saturday. This rocket carries a space telescope that will illuminate mysterious cosmic phenomena known as dark energy; scientists say these unseen forces make up 95 percent of the known universe. The telescope, named Euclid after the Greek mathematician, is owned by the European Space Agency and is housed inside a Falcon-9 rocket, which will launch from Cape Canaveral Space Station. This $1.4 billion mission will last at least six years. If everything goes according to plan, Euclid will have a short journey into space followed by a month-long trip to its final destination - Lagrange Point 2, located 1.6 million kilometers from Earth. From there, Euclid is set to survey galaxies up to 10 billion light-years away from Earth and investigate the evolution of what astronomers refer to as the 'dark universe' using a telescope. This two-ton spacecraft is equipped with instruments that precisely measure the intensity and spectra of infrared light and accurately determine their distances. The Euclid mission focuses on two essential components of the 'dark universe.' The first is 'dark matter,' an invisible scaffolding that shapes and structures the cosmos, and the second is 'dark energy,' a mysterious force opposite to gravity that explains how the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate. Scientists believe that 'dark energy' and 'dark matter' together constitute 95 percent of the universe's contents, while ordinary matter that we can see makes up only 5 percent. Euclid has been designed and built by the European Space Agency, with NASA providing imaging sensors for its near-infrared instruments. The Euclid consortium includes over 2,000 scientists from 13 European countries, the United States, Canada, and Japan. This mission was originally planned to be launched via a Russian Soyuz rocket, but after the war in Ukraine, the launch plan was shifted to SpaceX, owned by Elon Musk. Unlike the Hubble and James Webb space telescopes, which can only focus on one part of space at a time, scientists will use Euclid to simultaneously cover vast areas of extragalactic space. Scientists also hope that the data received from Euclid will allow them to test the performance of Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity in the cosmos.