On July 1 at 11:12 ET (15:12 UTC), a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying the European Space Agency’s Euclidean telescope into space soared into the sky above the Space Force Station at Cape Canaveral. The launch was nominal, and ESA reported that Euclid was in good condition and separated from the Falcon superunit 41 minutes after launch.

The mission is orbiting a stable Lissajous halo around the L2 Sun-Earth Lagrangian point, 700,000 miles (or more than 1.1 million kilometers) beyond the Moon’s anti-Sun trajectory. Euclid will join NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and ESA’s Gaia mission at L2.

The road to the starting point was long. Originally designed as two separate missions in 2007, the Dark Universe Explorer and the Spectroscopic All-Sky Cosmic Explorer (SPACE), Euclid is an M (Medium) class mission and is part of ESA’s Cosmic Visions program. The €600m telescope consisted of two initial missions. The 1.2 meter Euclidean mirror and other components have a unique silicon carbide structure that is ideal for cold space as it does not expand or warp with temperature fluctuations but is difficult to work with. Building Euclid took several setbacks, broken components and two years longer than planned.

Euclid also uses a simple grating prism or “grism” as a way to simultaneously capture the spectra of galaxies within the 0.5 degree field of view of the Near Infrared Spectrometer and Photometer (NSIP) camera. Unfortunately, plans for an innovative light splitter spectrograph with thousands of small interchangeable mirrors had to be canceled due to the added complexity and cost.

The mission was originally scheduled to launch on a Soyuz rocket in early 2023, but the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 forced ESA to look for a new launch vehicle. Eventually SpaceX stepped in to provide the Falcon 9 rocket to take Euclid into space.

NASA is also a partner of the Euclidean mission and has built 20 detectors that are part of the observatory’s Near Infrared Instrument. 40 American scientists are also participating in the Euclid consortium.

Euclid’s task is to determine the equation of state for dark energy, the term that causes the expansion of the universe to accelerate. Albert Einstein proposed and later rejected a similar force, which he called the cosmological force. stable. But it wasn’t until 1999 that astronomers actually saw accelerated expansion when measuring standard candles known as Type Ia supernovae.

Dark energy soon became part of the standard model of cosmology, including the influence of dark matter. The model is supported by models observed in the cosmic microwave background, galaxy clusters and hundreds of supernova observations. These and other measurements show that the universe is composed of 5% “normal” (baryonic) matter, 27% dark matter, and 68% dark energy.

This means that the universe is mostly made up of dark matter and dark energy; Most of what we can see, such as stars, galaxies, and ourselves, is a small part of the whole. Our modern understanding of dark energy puts its equation of state, or wA value of -1 means an ever-expanding universe.