Europe will launch a powerful telescope into space on Saturday to explore the mysteries of the "dark universe".
The €1.4 billion ($1.53 billion) Euclid telescope will be fired into orbit by a rocket from Elon Musk’s SpaceX after the war in Ukraine scuppered plans to take off on a Russian Soyuz launcher.
Euclid will look 10 billion years into the past to build what the European Space Agency calls the largest, most accurate 3D map of the universe ever produced.
Its mission is to reconstruct how space has expanded at an ever-faster rate and shed light on the "dark energy" that is believed to be the universe’s secret growth hormone.
The two-tonne spacecraft is a scaled-down version of Nasa’s James Webb Space Telescope, which launched in 2021 and can zoom into some of the earliest galaxies ever formed.
Asked by The National what Europe’s telescope had to offer, Rene Laureijs, a scientist on the project, said Euclid could map a vast area of space and relay the information to Webb to investigate more closely.
“What Euclid can do is surf the sky and find exotic objects,” he said.
“It would be beautiful if the two telescopes are online and that James Webb could follow up the new findings of Euclid.”
SpaceX launch
Euclid is due to take off from Florida’s Cape Canaveral at 11.12am local time on Saturday.
SpaceX's Falcon 9 launcher was brought on board for the launch after Europe’s spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana, cut ties with Russia.
Hopes that the war in Ukraine would end quickly enough for work with Russia to resume proved short-lived.
An alternative to Russia’s Soyuz, the French-led Ariane 6 launcher, was hit by delays in what has been described as a crisis in Europe’s access to space.
“We were really left completely in nowhere-land without any launcher,” said Euclid’s project manager Giuseppe Racca at a pre-launch briefing.
“It was an incredibly tense period because we had in front of us the prospect of having to store the spacecraft for two years or more. It was really a big relief to be able to launch from Cape Canaveral instead of Kourou.”
After launch, Euclid – named after an Ancient Greek mathematician – will head for a vantage point about 1.5 million kilometres from the Earth known as Lagrange 2.
It has a shield that can permanently block the Sun’s light while its telescope points into deep space. An expected six-year survey of the universe will begin three months after launch.
What Mr Racca calls a “cosmic embarrassment” is that known matter such as galaxies, stars and so on make up only five per cent of the universe.
“Ninety-five per cent is made of other things which we don’t really know,” he said.
Another conundrum is that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate, a fact unknown until the age of the Hubble Space Telescope in the 1990s.
Cosmologists have put forward the idea that there is “dark energy”, a mysterious repulsive force that pushes out the boundaries of the universe.
Euclid’s map of the sky is meant to reconstruct the history of the universe over 10 billion years and provide an unrivalled “gold mine” of data to help solve these cosmic riddles.
“We would like to know why dark energy dominates the mass-energy content of the universe today, and what will be the ultimate destiny of the universe,” said Yannick Melier, an astronomer at the Paris Institute of Astrophysics.
“We expect from Euclid’s information to know whether there is a revolution in our understanding of the physical laws of nature. Euclid will probe the distribution of dark matter and the distribution of galaxies to an unprecedented precision from space.”
Euclid is the latest ambitious European Space Agency mission after a spacecraft bound for Jupiter set off in April.
The agency has spoken of its dream of a crewed European-led voyage taking off with astronauts from Africa, Asia and South America.
Nasa will launch its inquiry into dark energy when the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope joins Euclid in the sky around 2027. US scientists also helped design Euclid’s equipment and tested components at a Nasa flight centre.
