CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — A brand new space observatory is flying across the void after a dramatic launch atop a SpaceX rocket Saturday (July 1), but its journey has just begun.
The European Euclid space telescoe began its long journey to deep space on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket at 11:11 a.m. EDT (1511 GMT) from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on Florida’s Space Coast.
“You may imagine all the strain and all of the pressure that’s on people,” European Space Agency director-general Josef Aschbacher said at a briefing after the launch Saturday (July 1). He added not all the strain has dissipated yet.
Related: How will Europe’s Euclid space telescope see into the dark universe?
“It was really a incredible launch — from the insertion of the spacecraft into orbit separation,” he noted. But he said researchers are anxious to the purpose “where the assorted instruments are being switched on. This takes a few weeks.”
The space observatory will now spend the subsequent month commuting to the sun-Earth Lagrange point 2, which is about 1 million miles (1.5 million km) away from our planet on the other side of the sun.
Next comes a fancy sequence of tests and observations to ensure that its two instruments are able to go before it’s cleared for its ultimate mission: to seek out evidence of invisible dark matter and dark energy and the way it’s shaping our universe, Euclid project manager Giuseppe Racca told Space.com.
Now that Euclid is in space and sending signals home, its first task is to place itself on the precise trajectory for L2. That can occur roughly two days after launch, and its path shall be verified along the solution to ensure that it’s heading in the precise direction.
The primary month of Euclid’s space journey will see it fly to L2, naturally cooling right down to space temperatures, while all instruments and systems shall be checked out for space. Then months 2 and three will see engineers assess the performance of Euclid against what we would expect on the bottom (which is able to include, perhaps, the discharge of some calibration images — although mission representatives are tight-lipped concerning the timing.)
“After this total of three months, then we ought to be ready to start out science observations, but we still need to make some particular calibration even then,” Racca said. Euclid will probably be fully ready in about eight months, assuming nothing goes awry through the testing.
The long calibration sequence is akin to what the NASA James Webb Space Telescope experienced after its own launch and journey to L2, which luckily happened with just minor calibration issues. JWST is peering at teeny-tiny sections of the universe in high detail, while Euclid will as an alternative survey large swaths of the sky for the bending of sunshine around stars or galaxies. That is a telltale sign of the dark universe.
Racca said team members will especially be anxious for image quality, which could be affected by things corresponding to humidity — an irony considering Euclid launched from Florida during a typical damp July day. “Only a number of nanometers of water ice into our optics affects our image quality,” he said.
There fortunately is a backup plan if Euclid has a little bit of stray moisture, but mission project scientist René Laureijs told Space.com it is going to be tricky.
“If we do have contamination, we’ve got to heat up the satellite to chill it down again to get the moisture away,” he said. “In principle, we will just do it. But it is going to shot a hole in our schedule.”
Euclid must get moving quickly to map 15,000 square degrees (a 3rd of the sky), so the team shall be watching anxiously to ensure that it’s able to go. If the moisture does must be removed, Laureijs said it is going to be “difficult to do to be able to finish the survey on time,” but there continues to be room for it.