A SpaceX rocket in Florida stood poised for launch on Saturday carrying an orbital telescope built to shed light on mysterious cosmic phenomena known as dark energy and dark matter, unseen forces scientists say account for 95% of the known universe.
The telescope dubbed Euclid, named for the ancient Greek mathematician called the "father of geometry," was carried aloft in the cargo bay of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that blasted off around 11 a.m. EDT from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.New insights from the $1.4 billion European Space Agency mission, designed to last at least six years, are expected to transform astrophysics and perhaps understanding of the very nature of gravity itself.
The 2-ton spacecraft is also equipped with instruments designed to measure the intensity and spectrums of infrared light from those galaxies in a way that will precisely determine their distances. Euclid was designed and built entirely by ESA, with the U.S. space agency, NASA, supplying photo detectors for its near-infrared instrument. The Euclid Consortium overall comprises more than 2,000 scientists from 13 European nations, the U.S., Canada and Japan.
Dark matter and dark energy cannot be detected directly, but their properties "are encoded in the shapes and positions of the galaxies," said astrophysicist Jason Rhodes, lead scientist for Euclid at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory near Los Angeles. Observing subtle but distinct changes in the shapes and positions of galaxies over vast spans of time and space will reveal fine variations in cosmic acceleration, indirectly exposing the forces of dark energy, scientists say.
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