This handout photo provided courtesy of ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA on July 31, 2023, shows a test photo taken during commissioning of ESA’s Euclid spacecraft, to check that the Near Infrared Spectrometer and Photometer instrument is working as expected. AFPPIX: The Euclid space telescope, launched July 1 on a mission to shed more light on elusive dark matter and dark energy, has reached its destination orbit and on Monday its European operators revealed its first test images.
“After more than 11 years of designing and developing Euclid, it’s exhilarating and enormously emotional to see these first images,“ Euclid project manager Giuseppe Racca in a statement. By capturing light that has taken 10 billion years to reach Earth's vicinity, the map will also offer a new view of the 13.8-billion-year-old universe's history.
An investigation led researchers to believe that “some sunlight was creeping into the spacecraft, probably through a tiny gap,“ but that it was only detected when Euclid was oriented in certain ways.