Euclid successfully launched on a mission to investigate two great mysteries of the universe

The European space telescope Euclid took off with the Falcon 9 rocket of the company SpaceX (SpaceX) from the base of Cape Canaveral in the American state of Florida at 17:12 CET.

As announced by the European Space Agency (ESA), the successful launch marks the beginning of an ambitious mission to discover the nature of two mysterious components of the universe - dark matter and dark energy, and to help in the search to answer the question - what is the universe made of?

After launch and separation from the rocket, ESA's European Space Operations Center (ESOC) in Darmstadt confirmed the reception of a signal from the Euclid telescope via a ground station in Australia six minutes later.

"The successful launch of Euclid marks the beginning of a new scientific endeavor that will help us answer one of the most amazing questions of modern science," says ESA Director General Jozef Ashbacher.

"The search for answers to fundamental questions about our cosmos is what makes us human. And it is often what drives the advancement of science and the development of powerful, far-reaching, new technologies. ESA is committed to expanding Europe's ambitions and success in space for future generations," he said. is Ashbacher.

Euclid has two advanced scientific instruments - the Visible Wavelength (VIS) camera and the Near Infrared Spectrometer and Photometer (NISP). ESA announced that NASA provided the detectors for NISP.

Euclid will look at billions of galaxies to create the largest, most accurate 3D map of the universe, with the third dimension representing time itself. This detailed chart of the shapes, positions and motions of galaxies, according to the ESA, will reveal how matter is distributed over vast distances and how the expansion of the universe has evolved over cosmic history, allowing astronomers to infer the properties of dark energy and dark matter.

"Today we celebrate the successful launch of a revolutionary mission that puts Europe at the forefront of cosmological studies," said ESA's Director of Science Carol Mandel.

"If we want to understand the universe we live in, we need to discover the nature of dark matter and dark energy and understand the role they played in shaping our cosmos. To address these fundamental questions, Euclid will provide the most detailed map of the extragalactic sky. This invaluable wealth of data will also allow the scientific community to explore many other aspects of astronomy for years to come," Mandel added.

To achieve its ambitious scientific goal, Euclid is equipped with a 1,2 m reflecting telescope that "feeds" two innovative scientific instruments - VIS, which takes very sharp images of galaxies across a large part of the sky, and NISP, which can analyze infrared galaxies, i.e. light by wavelength to accurately determine their distance.

The aircraft and communications will be controlled from ESOC. To cope with the massive amounts of data that Euclid will receive, ESA's deep space antenna network has been upgraded. This data will be analyzed by the Euclid Consortium - a group of more than 2.000 scientists from more than 300 institutes across Europe, the US, Canada and Japan.

As the mission progresses, the Euclid data repository will be published with an annual cadence and will be made available to the global scientific community through the Science Archive located at ESA's European Space Astronomy Center in Spain.

"This is a great moment for science, which we have long looked forward to, the launch of Euclid, on a mission to decipher the riddle of dark matter and dark energy. The great mystery of the basic ingredients of the universe is staring us in the face, offering a huge challenge. Thanks to its advanced telescope and powerful scientific instrumentation , Euclid is ready to help us unravel this mystery," says René Laureis, ESA's Euclid Project Scientist.

For the next four weeks, Euclid will travel toward the Sun-Earth Lagrangian point 2, the equilibrium point of the Sun-Earth system located 1,5 million km from Earth (about four times the Earth-Moon distance) in the opposite direction from the Sun. There, Euclid will be placed into orbit around this point and mission controllers will begin activities to check all spacecraft functions, check the telescope and finally turn on the science instruments.

Scientists and engineers will then be engaged in an intensive two-month phase of testing and calibrating Euclid's scientific instruments and preparing for routine observations. Over the course of six years, Euclid will survey one-third of the sky with unprecedented precision and sensitivity.