Space. What is the Euclid spacecraft unveiled this Tuesday by the European Space Agency?

Posted On: February 22, 2023

Finally unlocking the mysteries of… Dark Matter: This will be Euclid’s mission to be launched into orbit this summer. A very ambitious mission on a subject that is still hypothetical but would weigh more than a quarter of the total mass of the universe.

A gigantic 3D map of the universe

To achieve this, the Euclid super telescope must create a three-dimensional map of the universe – just that, more than a third of the sky. A map that will allow us to observe billions of galaxies and “see” them up to 10 billion light years away. That is the distance that light travels at 300,000 kilometers per second in 10 billion years.

Euclid will therefore examine how the universe has expanded and how its structure formed throughout cosmic history, further revealing the role of gravity and the nature of dark energy and dark matter.

To achieve this, the satellite will study galaxies at different distances from Earth with a 1.2 meter diameter telescope carrying two instruments: the Visible Light Observing Imager (VIS) and the Spectro – Near Infrared Imager (NISP). Euclid will cover an area of the sky corresponding to more than 35% of the celestial sphere.

According to the European Space Agency (ESA), “the mission will take advantage of the weak gravitational lensing effect” which should “allow scientists to reconstruct the last billion years of history of the universe’s expansion to estimate the acceleration by the mysterious dark energy with an accuracy of up to 1%; as well as “any acceleration fluctuations with an accuracy of 10%”.

A 100% European mission

Euclid is a 100% European ESA-led mission, yet benefits from contributions from US NASA, which provided near-infrared detectors for the NISP.

The Euclid consortium (more than 2000 scientists from 300 institutes in 13 European countries, the United States, Canada and Japan) provided the scientific tools and the analysis of the scientific data. The satellite and service module will be designed and built by Thales Alenia Space. Airbus Defense and Space is responsible for the payload module itself, including the telescope.

Originally, Euclid was going to be launched by a Russian Soyuz rocket… but due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, it’s finally a SpaceX Falcon 9 launch vehicle that will do so. The launch is expected for this summer 2023.