ESA’s Euclid mission aims to uncover the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy, which together comprise the vast majority of the known universe.The European Space Agency’s Euclid space telescope launches on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida on July 1, 2023.This weekend saw the launch of the European Space Agency ’s Euclid mission: a space telescope which aims to uncover the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy. The 2.2 ton spacecraft with its 1.
Euclid should arrive at L2 within four weeks, then conduct two months of preparations before beginning science observations around the beginning of October. Compare that to, say, the Hubble Space Telescope, which has a field of view that is just 1/12th the size of the moon. Hubble can image objects like galaxies or nebulae in great detail, but it would take Hubble around 1,000 years to survey a comparable area of the sky to Euclid.
Euclid will have two instruments: the VISible instrument or VIS, which operates in the visible light wavelength, and the Near-Infrared Spectrometer and Photometer or NISP, which operates in the near-infrared. Having both these wavelengths covered allows researchers to see galaxies which are redshifted, meaning that because they are moving away from us the light coming from them is shifted toward the red end of the spectrum.
The two main methods for studying dark energy and dark matter used by Euclid will be weak lensing and galaxy clustering. Using two methods for examining the same thing allows the researchers to check their results against each other, hopefully resulting in more accurate findings.