CAPE CANAVERAL, FLORIDA — Europe’s dark universe hunter is prepared to depart its home planet.
Euclid, a dark matter and dark energy mission, is about to launch from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station here tomorrow (July 1) aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. Launch is scheduled for July 1 at 11:11 a.m. EDT (1511 GMT). A live webcast from NASA Television shall be carried here at Space.com totally free starting at 10:30 a.m. EDT (1430 GMT).
After liftoff, Euclid will spend a couple of month journeying to the distant Sun-Earth Lagrange Point 2, on the alternative side of the sun to us and about 1 million miles (1.5 million kilometers) from Earth. After one other seven months of commissioning, the probe will spend six years studying the dark universe, gathering data that can make clear the evolution of galaxies, the expansion of the universe and other physical phenomena.
“That is 15 years of individuals’s lives,” Carole Mundell, the European Space Agency’s (ESA) director of science, said during a prelaunch briefing on June 23. “There have been two teams that originally proposed missions, one to check dark energy and one to check dark matter. Each were incredibly difficult, but we thought, ‘Well, that is not hard enough. Let’s put them each together on a single spacecraft and do the not possible.’ “
Related: James Webb Space Telescope will help Euclid spacecraft investigate dark energy and dark matter
Dark matter is believed to make up a lot of the material universe, but we will only see it through its gravitational effects. Dark energy is the force believed to be pushing along the accelerating expansion of the universe. Euclid goals to bring sharper eyes to the sky than ever before to attempt to demystify dark matter and dark energy.
As Mundell noted, the 1.4 billion-euro ($1.5 billion USD) Euclid was originally split amongst two mission concepts proposed to ESA in 2007: Dune (Dark Universe Explorer) and Space (Spectroscopic All Sky Cosmic Explorer). Euclid, chosen in 2011, forges the complementary studies of those proposals to look at dark matter and dark energy across time and space.
Euclid will include two complementary experiments. The primary examines lensing — the “precise detail, the shapes of galaxies … that goes back to 10 billion light-years,” said Gaitee Hussain, head of ESA’s science division, in the course of the same briefing. The second study will scrutinize the redshifting of galaxies, or the sunshine of receding galaxies being stretched into the red parts of the wavelength spectrum.
The pictures by Euclid shall be 4 times sharper than equivalent ground surveys taking a look at large swaths of the sky, Hussain added. “That also requires really working hard on the technology to get essentially the most out of the instrumentation we possibly can,” Hussain said.
Euclid will perform this work using two instruments. One will concentrate on visible light, whereas the opposite is optimized for infrared (heat) wavelengths.
Euclid can be complementary to other missions with ESA involvement that take a look at cosmic time, akin to Europe’s Gaia, which tracks the situation of greater than a billion objects in space, and the NASA-led James Webb Space Telescope, which is peering at a few of the universe’s first-ever stars and galaxies, amongst other tasks.
The forecast for launch on Saturday appears excellent. For the early morning before 8 a.m. local (the longest-range data available within the 24-hour forecast), Cape Canaveral Space Force Station could have clear skies and no likelihood of rain or lightning, with light winds of just five knots, in line with the forecast from the U.S. Space Force’s Space Launch Delta 45.