Engineers helped Euclid see reference stars; software adjustments resolved navigation problems. Observation programs for the next six years were rearranged to avoid accidental sunlight exposure, and the telescope will now undergo final testing in full “science research mode.”

The European Space Agency’s (ESA) “dark universe tracker” has not been working properly for several months. He reached the L2 Lagrange point, focused his mirror and obtained the first test images. However, it soon became apparent that the mission had technical problems.

The mission team was most concerned about the fine-tuning sensor, which was the basis of the observing program and needed to precisely target the correct regions of the sky, sometimes failing to find reference stars. The sun sometimes interfered with the system’s operation, as protons hit the system’s detectors, creating signals that the sensor mistakenly interpreted as real stars.

The “commissioning phase” is the period when the mission designed and tested on Earth faces the real conditions of space: there are almost always unforeseen nuances. During this time, ESA’s flight control team worked 12-hour shifts providing 24-hour surveillance of Euclid, keeping in contact with mission scientists and engineers to prepare the space telescope for its new environment and future mission.

Following the work of teams from across Europe, the Euclid precision targeting sensor was upgraded and tested for ten days. After successfully identifying the host star, Euclid continued with the compatibility check phase, the final test before being sent for scientific observations.

The goal of the Euclidean Space Telescope mission is to answer some fundamental scientific questions about the nature of our universe: What are dark matter and dark energy that make up probably 95% of our universe but remain undetected? How does general relativity work on cosmic scales? How was the universe shaped after the Big Bang?

The telescope will observe a third of the entire sky, looking back 10 billion years to help us understand the physics of the early universe and the formation of cosmic structures. Euclid, which measures the shape of billions of galaxies with unprecedented precision throughout billions of years of cosmic history, will provide the three-dimensional distribution of dark matter in the universe. A map of the distribution of galaxies on the time scale of the Universe will tell about dark energy affecting the spatial evolution of the large-scale structure of the Universe. Source