SpaceX launched the European Space Agency's (ESA) remarkable Euclid satellite from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida earlier today. Euclid is the latest in a series of new observation satellites that have launched recently, but it is one of the few designed to study more than a billion galaxies at different wavelengths and analyze an unbelievable ten billion years of time. Euclid will travel nearly a million miles away from Earth, and it has a 1.2 meter telescope that sends light to two instruments that are capable of processing infrared and visible light.
ESA's Euclid Telescope Will Study Dark Matter & Energy As Part Of Six Year Mission
The Falcon 9 lifted off from the Cape at 11:12 am local time and soon sent the second stage to space. The Euclid telescope launch was SpaceX's 44th mission of 2023 and the 243rd overall mission, with the booster for the launch being a new rocket that had only flown once previously to take a crew of private astronauts to space.
ESA's Euclid telescope is one of the more exceptional satellites that aims to study the nature of the universe, dark matter and dark energy. Its mission timeline is six years and while ESA states that the duration can be extended, it will eventually be limited by the amount of cold gas available on board to maneuver the spacecraft.
Through the satellite, ESA plans to study an unbelievable ten billion years of time as it peeks deep into the universe to understand the structure of galaxies and other parameters. The telescope's ambitious objectives are to catalog a whopping 1.5 billion galaxies and compare their brightness at different light wavelengths. This catalog will enable astronomers to understand galactic characteristics such as size, mass and the number of stars produced.
At the heart of Euclid's investigation are dark matter and dark energy. While dark matter is invisible, its presence is detected through the gravitational pull on galaxies. Coupled with the fact that astronomers do not know why the universe is expanding creates mysteries that have remained unsolved to date. To improve the understanding of these phenomena, Euclid's universe map will create detailed views of galaxies over six years after the first three months are spent calibrating the data. More than two thousand scientists across Europe, Canada, Japan and the U.S. will be involved in studying the data from the satellite.
The telescope will also provide data to confirm whether Albert Einstein's hypothesis about gravity is correct. Einstein's theories have never been tested at the distances and scale at which Euclid will gather its data. Subsequently, the mission will also aid physicists along with astronomers.
Falcon 9's second stage entered its orbit roughly nine minutes after launch, after which it lit its engine for the second time a little over twenty minutes before payload deployment. Euclid will travel to the Sun-Earth Lagrange point 2, 1.5 million kilometers away from Earth, after making small course corrections over the next thirty days. It will orbit this point and take advantage of the gravitational balance at this point. The choice of destination will also give Euclid a clear view of the sky and enable it to communicate effectively with Earth. The heat from the Sun will prevent temperature-caused jittering on the telescope, allowing it to take crisper images.
As for today's launch, the main milestone that ESA was tracking was acquiring signals from the telescope. It separated from the Falcon 9 second stage a little over 41 minutes post launch, traveling at an altitude greater than 5,500 kilometers and faster than 27,000 kilometers per hour. Soon after payload separation, ground teams at ESA confirmed signal acquisition to mark the end of today's launch.
source https://wccftech.com/spacex-sends-dark-energy-telescope-a-million-miles-away-from-earth-at-27000-km-h/