A little while ago, ESA’s Euclid Space Telescope was launched atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral. After just over 40 minutes, it successfully separated from the rocket’s last stage and entered its course that will take it towards the so-called L2 point, about 1.5 million kilometers from Earth, where its scientific mission will begin with an investigation of the dark universe.

The Euclid Space Telescope mission is focused on the cosmological mysteries connected to dark matter and dark energy. Cosmological research in recent decades indicates that the universe we see with the ordinary matter that forms galaxies constitutes only a small part of the cosmos. Astronomers and physicists are having difficulty investigating parts of the cosmos that we can neither see nor directly detect. It’s a problem that makes it difficult to test models that try to explain the effects that led to hypothesize the existence of dark matter and dark energy. For this reason, ESA developed a scientific mission focused on these cosmological problems.