Today, from the United States, Europe launched the “invasion” of the hidden side of the universe by sending the Euclid Telescope into space, on a mission bearing a Portuguese “imprint” of scientists, companies and engineers.
The European Space Agency (ESA) mission, with the participation of its American counterpart NASA, was scheduled to launch at 4:11 pm (Lisbon time) from NASA’s Cape Canaveral base.
The telescope, named after the mathematician Euclides and equipped with two scientific instruments, will go into space in conjunction with the Falcon 9 rocket, from the American space company SpaceX, owned by businessman Elon Musk.
Portugal, a member state of the European Space Agency since 2000, figures prominently in an ESA space mission for the first time, as part of a consortium set up to develop, build and operate the telescope.
Scientists, engineers and companies come from Portugal to contribute to the mission in various areas, from monitoring flight operations to manufacturing various space telescope components and planning observations.
Thiago Loureiro, an aerospace engineer who has worked for the European Space Agency for 19 years, will co-manage flight operations from Germany, where the European Space Agency’s European Space Operations Center operates.
This is the first space mission designed to try to understand what is actually speeding up the expansion of the universe and which, according to cosmological theories, is caused by dark energy, a mysterious force that opposes gravity.
Dark energy and dark matter together (the invisible matter, which neither emits nor absorbs light) makes up 95% of the universe that remains to be discovered.
In order to help “shine light” on the hidden universe, the Euclid telescope will, during the six years of its mission, make about 50,000 observations of galaxies, a work planned by the Institute of Astrophysics and Space Sciences.
The telescope will observe billions of galaxies, over which dark matter and energy generate influences in their structure, shape, distribution, motion and evolution, across more than a third of the sky and “go back” up to 10 billion years.
Euclid will be located 1.5 million kilometers from Earth, at a stable point, without interference from the light of the planet, the moon and the sun, where it will arrive a month after launch.
The first image release is expected in November and the first scientific data will be in December 2024.
If the launch fails today, there is a second chance on Sunday.
The Euclid telescope was to be launched in 2020 and later in 2022, from ESA’s base in French Guiana, on a Russian Soyuz rocket.
However, in the year 2022, the European Space Agency severed ties with Russia when the country invaded Ukraine in February.
Today, Europe launched a telescope to study the hidden side of the universe
