Earier today, the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Euclid Space Telescope was safely launched from Cape Canaveral on a Space X Falcon 9 rocket (though the original plan was to use a Russian Soyuz rocket until the invasion nixed that idea). The space telescope is destined for the Sun-Earth Lagrange point 2 (L2), which is an average distance of 1 million miles beyond Earth’s orbit. It will join the James Webb Space Telescope.
In addition to the 1.2 meter diameter telescope, the mission includes two scientific instruments: a visible-wavelength camera (the VISible instrument, VIS) and a near-infrared camera/spectrometer (the Near-Infrared Spectrometer and Photometer, NISP).
The focus of the new space telescope will be to create a 3D map of the universe to better understand dark matter and dark energy. As noted on the ESA’s website, Euclid hopes to answer these questions:
- What is the structure and history of the cosmic web?
- What is the nature of dark matter?
- How has the expansion of the Universe changed over time?
- What is the nature of dark energy?
- Is our understanding of gravity complete?
It is a tall order for this new telescope. Astronomer Isobel Hook from the UK’s Lancaster University put it this way to BBC News:
It will be like setting off on a ship before people knew where land was in different directions. We’ll be mapping out the Universe to try to understand where we fit into it and how we’ve got here – how the whole Universe got from the point of the Big Bang to the beautiful galaxies we see around us, the Solar System and to life.
Our Awesome Universe 