Euclid will use a telescope to survey galaxies as far away as 10 billion light-years from Earth across an immense expanse of the sky beyond our own Milky Way galaxy.
The telescope Euclid, named for the ancient Greek mathematician known as the “father of geometry”, was carried aloft in the cargo bay of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that was launched from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on Saturday.
New insights from the $1.4bn European Space Agency mission, designed to last at least six years, are expected to transform astrophysics and perhaps understanding of the very nature of gravity itself.
Following a short flight to space, Euclid will be released from the Falcon for a month-long voyage to its destination in solar orbit nearly 1.6 million kilometres (one million miles) from Earth – a position of gravitational stability between the Earth and sun called the Lagrange Point Two, or L2.
From there, Euclid is designed to explore the evolution of what astrophysicists refer to as the “dark universe” using a wide-angle telescope to survey galaxies as far away as 10 billion light-years from Earth across an immense expanse of the sky beyond our own Milky Way galaxy.
The two-tonne spacecraft is also equipped with instruments designed to measure the intensity and spectrums of infrared light from those galaxies in a way that will precisely determine their distances.
The lead scientist said Euclid will measure dark energy and dark matter with unprecedented precision.
“It’s more than a space telescope, Euclid. It’s really a dark energy detector,” Rene Laureijs noted.
The mission focuses on two foundational components of the dark universe. One is dark matter, the invisible but theoretically influential cosmic scaffolding thought to give shape and texture to the cosmos.
The other is dark energy, an equally enigmatic force believed to explain why the expansion of the universe, as scientists learned in the 1990s, has long been accelerating.