SpaceX Launches ESA's 'Euclid' Space Telescope to Study Dark Energy's Effect on the Universe (cnn.com) 19
"The European Space Agency's Euclid space telescope launched at 11:12 a.m. ET Saturday," reports CNN, "aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.
CNN is calling it "a mission designed to unravel some of the greatest mysteries of the universe." The 1.2-meter-diameter (4-foot-diameter) telescope has set off on a monthlong journey to its orbital destination of the sun-Earth Lagrange point L2, which is nearly 1 million miles (1.6 million kilometers) away from Earth and also home to NASA's James Webb Space Telescope... After arriving at orbit, Euclid will spend two months testing and calibrating its instruments — a visible light camera and a near-infrared camera/spectrometer — before surveying one-third of the sky for the next six years. Euclid's primary goal is to observe the "dark side" of the universe, including dark matter and dark energy. While dark matter has never actually been detected, it is believed to make up 85% of the total matter in the universe. Meanwhile, dark energy is a mysterious force thought to play a role in the accelerating expansion of the universe.
In the 1920s, astronomers Georges Lemaître and Edwin Hubble discovered that the universe has been expanding since its birth 13.8 billion years ago. But research that began in the 1990s has shown that something sparked an acceleration of the universe's expansion about 6 billion years ago, and the cause remains a mystery. Unlocking the true nature of dark energy and dark matter could help astronomers understand what the universe is made of, how its expansion has changed over time, and if there is more to understanding gravity than meets the eye... Euclid is designed to create the largest and most accurate three-dimensional map of the universe, observing billions of galaxies that stretch 10 billion light-years away to reveal how matter may have been stretched and pulled apart by dark energy over time. These observations will effectively allow Euclid to see how the universe has evolved over the past 10 billion years...
The telescope's image quality will be four times sharper than those of ground-based sky surveys. Euclid's wide perspective can also record data from a part of the sky 100 times bigger than what Webb's camera can capture. During its observations, the telescope will create a catalog of 1.5 billion galaxies and the stars within them, creating a treasure trove of data for astronomers that includes each galaxy's shape, mass and number of stars created per year. Euclid's ability to see in near-infrared light could also reveal previously unseen objects in our own Milky Way galaxy, such as brown dwarfs and ultra-cool stars.
In May 2027, Euclid will be joined in orbit by the Nancy Grace Roman Telescope. The two missions will overlap in their study of cosmic acceleration as they both create three-dimensional maps of the universe...Roman will study one-twentieth of the sky in infrared light, allowing for much more depth and precision. The Roman telescope will peer back to when the universe was just 2 billion years old, picking out fainter galaxies than Euclid can see.
CNN points out that "While primarily an ESA mission, the telescope includes contributions from NASA and more than 2,000 scientists across 13 European countries, the United States, Canada and Japan."
And they also note this statement from Jason Rhodes, a senior research scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "With these upcoming telescopes, we will measure dark energy in different ways and with far more precision than previously achievable, opening up a new era of exploration into this mystery."
From NASA's announcement: Scientists are unsure whether the universe's accelerated expansion is caused by an additional energy component, or whether it signals that our understanding of gravity needs to be changed in some way. Astronomers will use Roman and Euclid to test both theories at the same time, and scientists expect both missions to uncover important information about the underlying workings of the universe...
Less concentrated mass, like clumps of dark matter, can create more subtle effects. By studying these smaller distortions, Roman and Euclid will each create a 3D dark matter map... Tallying up the universe's dark matter across cosmic time will help scientists better understand the push-and-pull feeding into cosmic acceleration.
SpaceX tweeted footage of the telescope's takeoff, and the successful landing of their Falcon 9's first stage on a droneship called A Shortfall of Gravitas.
CNN is calling it "a mission designed to unravel some of the greatest mysteries of the universe." The 1.2-meter-diameter (4-foot-diameter) telescope has set off on a monthlong journey to its orbital destination of the sun-Earth Lagrange point L2, which is nearly 1 million miles (1.6 million kilometers) away from Earth and also home to NASA's James Webb Space Telescope... After arriving at orbit, Euclid will spend two months testing and calibrating its instruments — a visible light camera and a near-infrared camera/spectrometer — before surveying one-third of the sky for the next six years. Euclid's primary goal is to observe the "dark side" of the universe, including dark matter and dark energy. While dark matter has never actually been detected, it is believed to make up 85% of the total matter in the universe. Meanwhile, dark energy is a mysterious force thought to play a role in the accelerating expansion of the universe.
In the 1920s, astronomers Georges Lemaître and Edwin Hubble discovered that the universe has been expanding since its birth 13.8 billion years ago. But research that began in the 1990s has shown that something sparked an acceleration of the universe's expansion about 6 billion years ago, and the cause remains a mystery. Unlocking the true nature of dark energy and dark matter could help astronomers understand what the universe is made of, how its expansion has changed over time, and if there is more to understanding gravity than meets the eye... Euclid is designed to create the largest and most accurate three-dimensional map of the universe, observing billions of galaxies that stretch 10 billion light-years away to reveal how matter may have been stretched and pulled apart by dark energy over time. These observations will effectively allow Euclid to see how the universe has evolved over the past 10 billion years...
The telescope's image quality will be four times sharper than those of ground-based sky surveys. Euclid's wide perspective can also record data from a part of the sky 100 times bigger than what Webb's camera can capture. During its observations, the telescope will create a catalog of 1.5 billion galaxies and the stars within them, creating a treasure trove of data for astronomers that includes each galaxy's shape, mass and number of stars created per year. Euclid's ability to see in near-infrared light could also reveal previously unseen objects in our own Milky Way galaxy, such as brown dwarfs and ultra-cool stars.
In May 2027, Euclid will be joined in orbit by the Nancy Grace Roman Telescope. The two missions will overlap in their study of cosmic acceleration as they both create three-dimensional maps of the universe...Roman will study one-twentieth of the sky in infrared light, allowing for much more depth and precision. The Roman telescope will peer back to when the universe was just 2 billion years old, picking out fainter galaxies than Euclid can see.
CNN points out that "While primarily an ESA mission, the telescope includes contributions from NASA and more than 2,000 scientists across 13 European countries, the United States, Canada and Japan."
And they also note this statement from Jason Rhodes, a senior research scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "With these upcoming telescopes, we will measure dark energy in different ways and with far more precision than previously achievable, opening up a new era of exploration into this mystery."
From NASA's announcement: Scientists are unsure whether the universe's accelerated expansion is caused by an additional energy component, or whether it signals that our understanding of gravity needs to be changed in some way. Astronomers will use Roman and Euclid to test both theories at the same time, and scientists expect both missions to uncover important information about the underlying workings of the universe...
Less concentrated mass, like clumps of dark matter, can create more subtle effects. By studying these smaller distortions, Roman and Euclid will each create a 3D dark matter map... Tallying up the universe's dark matter across cosmic time will help scientists better understand the push-and-pull feeding into cosmic acceleration.
SpaceX tweeted footage of the telescope's takeoff, and the successful landing of their Falcon 9's first stage on a droneship called A Shortfall of Gravitas.
Re: How does it help? (Score:3)
The time it would take to align the Hubble multiple times for multiple non-widefield images is time not devoted to other Hubble projects.
Re:How does it help? (Score:4, Insightful)
Same reason Spitzer, Herschel, IXPE, Compton and Kepler were also built; specialized tools for specialized goals.
Re: (Score:2)
Well that's both a feature and a problem though and partly why its sitting at like 70% server share and 2% desktop share though.
In this comparison Windows is the Hubble, the broad use legend that everyone wants some time on...
Re: How does it help? (Score:2)
Itâ(TM)s much quicker. They absolutely could do this with a narrow telescope, it would just take many moons, and no other science would be being done on that telescope.
Re:How does it help? (Score:5, Informative)
The telescope needs to remain pointed at each area for quiet some time (sometimes hours) in order to collect enough light to analyze for things like spectral lines. If you tried to do a big survey with Hubble it would take an impossible amount of time. Remember that most big telescope are operating pretty much constantly (or at least at night for terrestrial telescopes), so they are already gathering as much data is they can
Hubble is a great instrument for getting a lot of detail on one tiny patch of sky, while telescopes like Euclid are designed to survey very large areas of sky.
Note that improvements in sensor technology (and other technologies) have made it possible to build much wider field telescopes than in the past
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
You can observe wavelengths that are not transmitted by the earth's atmosphere, and you also don't get spectra that are contaminated by trace elements in the earth's atmosphere.
Space is a lot darker than even a good night sky, so there is less stray light contaminating the image
The observ
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Hubble's optical wide field camera 3 has a field of view of 164 x 164 arc seconds, or 0.002 square degrees. The IR channel is similar. That area is covered by 16 megapixels in the optical and 1 megapixel in the IR.
Euclid has a field of view of 0.5 square degrees, with 600 megapixels in the optical and 65 in the IR.
Euclid's area of interest is 15-17 thousand square degrees. That would take 7 or eight million Hubble FOVs, but you need some overlap, so say optimistically 10 million. Euclid needs more like 30 t
I love the Webb telescope (Score:3)
But oh Euclid!
All three at the same point? (Score:2)
What could go wrong?
Space is big (Score:4, Informative)
What could go wrong?
Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.
--Douglas Adams
Re: All three at the same point? (Score:3)
There's many more observatories at L2. 'At' is not correct here: they orbit points a tiny bit closer to us than L2, that's more stable: while that makes them slowly move towards Earth, that's better than have them drift away, lost forever. A monthly burn away from us keeps them at that orbit.
The orbit around L2' is on the order of 10^6km, a couple of times the Earth-Moon distance. So no, they aren't going to collide. Don't worry.
Sci teacher but I must⦠(Score:2)
âoeThey could be striped matter and purple dwarves, it still doesn't change the fact that I don't own a car.âoe
Open Source on Euclid (Score:3)
At least the EUCLID Near-Infrared Spectro-Photometer (NISP) is based on the open source real-time operating system RTEMS (rtems.org). The instrument and its software is described in detail in this technical report (http://amsdottorato.unibo.it/8437/7/fornari_federico_tesi.pdf). If you poke around, you might find the Docker image they use for development on GitHub.
Anyone know of other open source projects included in the on-board software?
Dark matter so dark we've never seen it (Score:2)
"While dark matter has never actually been detected, it is believed to make up 85% of the total matter in the universe. Meanwhile, dark energy is a mysterious force thought to play a role in the accelerating expansion of the universe." They shouldn't call it a something, they should say what they really mean, which is we haven't a clue how it works. That would explain the rationale for the mission even better. was not found on this server.