Euclid telescope

July 1, 2023

The European Space Agency (ESA) is embarking on an extraordinary mission with the launch of the Euclid Space Telescope.
It will be launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and will remain operational for a minimum of six years.
The spacecraft measures approximately 4.7 metres tall and 3.7 metres in diameter.
It is named after the Greek mathematician Euclid of Alexandria.

The unknowns in universe

Around 70 percent is thought to be dark energy, the name given to the unknown force that is causing the universe to expand at an accelerated rate.

And 25 percent is dark matter, thought to bind the universe together and make up around 80 percent of its mass.

This mission is part of ESA’s Cosmic Vision programme, which plans to explore the origin and components of the Universe and the fundamental laws that govern it.
The spacecraft will have a 1.2-metre-wide telescope and two instruments;
- A visible-wavelength camera (the VISible instrument): It will look for tiny distortions in the shapes of distant galaxies from different points in time to highlight the tussle between the pull of gravity and the push of dark energy.
- A near-infrared camera/spectrometer(the Near-Infrared Spectrometer and Photometer):

NISP will observe galaxies in the near-infrared range, providing essential data on their distance, redshift, and clustering properties. By measuring the distribution of galaxies at different cosmic epochs, NISP will aid in the study of large-scale cosmic structures.

After a month-long journey through space, Euclid will join its fellow space telescope James Webb at a stable hovering spot around 1.5 million kilometers (more than 930,000 miles) from Earth called the second Lagrange Point (L2).
Euclid will chart the largest-ever map of the universe, encompassing up to two billion galaxies across more than a third of the sky.
The telescope hopes to deliver images that are at least four times sharper than ground-based ones.