The telescope dubbed Euclid, a European Space Agency (ESA)
instrument named for the ancient Greek mathematician called the "father of
geometry," was bundled inside the cargo bay of a Falcon 9 rocket set for
blast-off around 11 am EDT (1500 GMT) from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.
New insights from the $1.4 billion mission, designed to last at least six years,
are expected to transform astrophysics and perhaps understanding of the very
nature of gravity itself.
If all goes as planned, Euclid will be released after a
short ride to space for a month-long voyage to its destination in solar orbit
nearly 1 million miles (1.6 million km) from Earth - a position of
gravitational stability between the Earth and sun called the Lagrange Point
Two, or L2.
From there, Euclid is designed to explore the evolution of
what astrophysicists refer to as the "dark universe," using a
wide-angle telescope to survey galaxies as far away as 10 billion light years
from Earth across an immense expanse of the sky beyond our own Milky Way
galaxy.
The 2-ton spacecraft is also equipped with instruments
designed to measure the intensity and spectrums of infrared light from those
galaxies in a way that will precisely determine their distances.
The mission focuses on two foundational components of the
dark universe. One is dark matter, the invisible but theoretically influential
cosmic scaffolding thought to give shape and texture to the cosmos. The other
is dark energy, an equally enigmatic force believed to explain why expansion of
the universe, as scientists learned in the 1990s, has long been accelerating.
The possibilities of the mission are reflected by the
enormity of Euclid's inquiry. Scientists estimate dark energy and dark matter
together make up 95 percent of the cosmos, while ordinary matter that we can
see accounts for just 5 percent.
European-led Mission
Euclid was designed and built entirely by ESA, with the US
space agency, NASA, supplying photo detectors for its near-infrared instrument.
The Euclid Consortium overall comprises more than 2,000 scientists from 13
European nations, the U.S., Canada and Japan.
A decade in the making, the mission originally was to have
flown to space by way of a Russian Soyuz rocket. But launch plans were switched
to SpaceX, the California-based venture of Elon Musk, after war erupted in
Ukraine, and because no slot was immediately available from Europe's Arianne
rocket program.
While the James Webb Space Telescope launched by NASA late
last year allows astronomers to zero in on particular objects from the early
universe with unprecedented clarity, Euclid is intended to expose the hidden
fabric and mechanics of the cosmos by meticulously charting an enormous swath
of the observable universe in 3-D, more than 1 billion galaxies in all.
Dark matter and dark energy cannot be detected directly, but
their properties "are encoded in the shapes and positions of the
galaxies," said astrophysicist Jason Rhodes, lead scientist for Euclid at
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory near Los Angeles.
"Measuring the shapes and positions of galaxies allows
us to infer the properties of dark matter and dark energy," Rhodes said on
Friday.
The data will be collected as Euclid maps the last 10
billion years of cosmic history across a third of the sky, gazing outward, and
thus back in time, to an era of the universe astronomers call "cosmic
noon," when most stars were forming.
Observing subtle but distinct changes in the shapes and
positions of galaxies over vast spans of time and space will reveal fine
variations in cosmic acceleration, indirectly exposing the forces of dark
energy, scientists say.
Euclid also will help reveal the nature of dark matter by
measuring an effect called gravitational lensing, which produces faint
distortions in galaxies' visible shapes and is attributed to the presence of
unseen material warping the fabric of space around it.
Through insights into dark energy and matter, scientists
hope to better grasp the formation and distribution of galaxies across the
so-called cosmic web of the universe.
Beyond Euclid's primary objectives, it will provide "a
gold mine for all fields of astronomy for several decades," said Yannick
Mellier, Euclid Consortium lead and astronomer at the Institut d'Astrophysique
de Paris. © Reuters