For the crews of Europe’s Euclid space mission, the long-awaited hour has finally arrived! After twenty years of work devoted to designing a probe capable of tracking the invisible but ultra-majority (95%) components of the Universe – dark matter and dark energy – their telescope is due to take off this Saturday, July 1 at 5:12 p.m. (French time) from the American base at Cape Canaveral in Florida. Indeed, following the outbreak of war in Ukraine, its launch initially planned for last April from the Franco-European base of Kourou in Guyana, on a Soyuz launcher, had been compromised.
It is finally aboard a Falcon 9 rocket from the American private company SpaceX that the two-ton device, manufactured by Thales Alenia Space, will join the James-Webb space telescope at the Lagrange point 2 of the Earth-Sun system. , about 1.5 million kilometers from our planet in the opposite direction from our star. A position which constitutes a zone of gravitational equilibrium following the Earth in its course around the Sun while remaining motionless in relation to these two bodies: the ideal for probing the deep universe.
Follow, live and in images, from 3:30 p.m., the launch preparations and takeoff of the European space mission Euclid:
From there, he will soon be able to draw a three-dimensional map of the Universe, encompassing 1.5 to 2 billion galaxies over about a third of the sky, going back in time as far as 10 billion years out of the 13 .8 in our Universe. Thus, if they cannot directly detect the dark matter which holds galaxies together and the dark energy which has accelerated the expansion of the universe for 5 to 6 billion years, scientists hope to better understand their nature. by studying their effects over time with an unparalleled level of precision. Which would mean lifting a corner of the veil on no less than 95% of the Cosmos!
If all goes according to plan, Euclid will take about four weeks to reach its final destination. After that, it will need a little more than two months to be fully operational and able to attack its scientific mission.
