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 hypothesizing the existence of dark matter and dark energy. For this reason, ESA developed a scientific mission focused on these cosmological problems.
The Euclid Space Telescope is equipped with two instruments: the Near Infrared Spectrometer and Photometer (NISP) will be used to precisely measure distances, distributions, and movements of galaxies while the Visible instrument (VIS) will conduct very detailed observations of a group of galaxies by measuring gravitational lensing and the distribution of dark matter.
In a mission scheduled to last six-year, the Euclid Space Telescope will conduct two surveys: the Euclid Wide Survey includes a large part of space and the Euclid Deep Fields, which instead focuses on the depth of detections. These surveys include a total of about 12 billion objects with a group of about 1.5 billion galaxies whose shape Euclid will accurately detect and precisely measure the redshift.
Data collected by the Euclid Space Telescope will help reconstruct the expansion of the universe. This is a key to better understand the gravitational effects largely attributed to dark matter and what appear to be the anti-gravity effects that are accelerating this expansion and are attributed to dark energy. Astronomers and physicists hope to obtain useful data to test cosmological models involving fundamental forces, elementary particles, and cosmic structures. This is also true for alternative models that don’t include the existence of dark matter and dark energy.
This ESA mission was supposed to use a Soyuz rocket but the breakdown of relations with Russia led to a radical change of plans. Arianespace, which managed the launch, used to purchase Soyuz rockets for launches that required a medium launcher and suddenly found itself without this option. To avoid a delay that could go on for years, it was decided to turn to SpaceX and for this reason, the launch took place in the USA, at Cape Canaveral.
It will take about a month for the Euclid Space Telescope to reach its destination, where the instruments will be tested and finally, its scientific mission can begin. It’s a long and ambitious mission with the hope that it will offer a lot of significant information to uncover some secrets of the universe.
