Скачать или смотреть ESA's Euclid Mission Launches to Explore 'Dark Universe' [space news]

The European Space Agency's (#ESA) new #telescope, called #Euclid, was launched into space on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on July 1 from Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral. The Falcon 9 rocket performed well, with its first stage making a soft landing on a floating platform in the Atlantic Ocean just eight minutes later. The second stage continued to carry the telescope, which separated from it about 41 minutes after liftoff and is now on its way to Lagrangian Point 2 of the Earth-Sun system, which is 1.5 million kilometers away from our planet. Of course, the Euclid Observatory will not be at one Lagrange point L2, it will rotate around this point on a special orbit. By the way, the James Webb telescope is also in orbit around the same Lagrangian point.

The €1.4 billion ($1.5 billion) Euclid telescope has been under development for almost two decades. In fact, it was based on two projects proposed by scientists back in 2007: the Dune mission (Dark Universe Explorer) and the Space mission (Spectroscopic All Sky Cosmic Explorer), which were supposed to use different but complementary ways to study dark energy and dark matter. Given how well these two missions complemented each other, the decision was made to combine them into one powerful space telescope: Euclid.

The Euclid telescope has a mass of more than 2,000 kg, the observatory's payload module consists of a Korsch telescope with a primary mirror 1.2 meters in diameter and several scientific instruments, including VIS, a camera operating in the visible wavelength range and containing 600 million pixels. It will measure the deformation of galaxies.

And NISP, an IR camera containing 65 million pixels, with an IR spectrometer: together they should provide redshift measurements and therefore distances to more than one billion galaxies.

The Euclid Observatory will look for evidence of dark energy by mapping the distribution of galaxies 10 billion years ago and comparing how this distribution has changed throughout the evolution of the universe. The observations will show whether there really is some kind of constant omnipresent force at work or perhaps something else is going on.

The Euclid Observatory will continue several scientific studies already being conducted by scientists using ground-based and space-based telescopes. These include, for example, the study of dark energy with the Victor M. Blanco telescope of Chile, which has so far mapped more than 100 million galaxies. And also the study conducted since 2015 with the ESA Gaia telescope, which has mapped the motion of nearly 2 billion bright stars in the Milky Way.

By the way, Euclid was not supposed to be launched by a SpaceX rocket at all. The telescope was planned to be launched on a Russian Soyuz-2 rocket. However, these plans were changed after February 2022. Meanwhile, all the launches of the latest Ariane 5 series rockets have already been scheduled, and the new European Ariane 6 rocket was not ready for launch. United Launch Alliance launches of the Atlas V and Delta IV Heavy rockets have also been fully scheduled. And ULA's Vulcan Centaur rocket is also not ready yet. That's how it turned out that SpaceX was the only viable option to launch the Euclid telescope this year.