SpaceX launches Euclid: a telescope to map the 'dark universe'

The Euclid is on a mission—to create a 3D map of the universe, and specifically, of its darkness.

Designed to seek out dark matter and dark energy as much as 10 billion light years away, the European Space Agency's new telescope will be peering well beyond the edges of the Milky Way.

It began its journey on Saturday, 1 July, lifting off from Florida on the back of a SpaceX Falcon9 rocket. "Godspeed, Euclid!" exclaimed one of its followers on Facebook, as the space telescope headed for separation an hour into its piggyback ride.

The launch was televised live on the ESA's YouTube channel until the New Norcia ground station in Australia confirmed receipt of its signal from space 12 hours ago, at 9:31 pm IST — its "first sign of life" as the ESA Operations team at Darmstadt, Germany, called it.

The space telescope—named after the Greek father of geometry from Alexandria, Egypt, who lived circa 300 BC—is essentially two instruments in one, and should be capable of mapping a third of the sky over six years.

One instrument is obviously the optical camera (Vis) that sees in the visible spectrum.

The other instrument (Nisp) is designed to access near-infrared radiation and allows the Euclid to investigate the redshift in the universe—effectively to 'go back in time' by about 10 billion years and 'see' the expansion of the universe from the Big Bang into what we know today.

This should allow us to understand the effect of dark matter and dark energy in the expansion and the creation of various space structures.

It will take another month for Euclid to drift into its designated L2 (Lagrange point 2, 1 million miles from Earth) position, and another 3 months for automated testing of its onboard instruments, before it is set for action. But the worth isn't too long, considering the $1 billion scope took over a decade to be designed and then built, anyway.

On the way, from NASA signing on to provide parts for Nisp, and Airbus in Toulouse, France, helping to assemble and integrate the two instruments, its been an exciting journey—what with Russia pulling out its Soyuz support, originally planned as the launch vehicle, at the last minute (2022), leaving Elon Musk's SpaceX to step in as the white knight.