A European-built orbital satellite was launched to space on Saturday from Florida on a mission to shed new light on the 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 (1500 GMT) from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.A livestream of the liftoff was shown on NASA TV.New insights from the $1.4 billion European Space Agency (ESA) mission, designed to last at least six years, are expected to transform astrophysics and perhaps understanding of the very nature of gravity itself.Following a short flight to space, Euclid was to be released from the Falcon for a month-long voyage to its destination in solar orbit nearly 1 million miles (1.6 million km) from Earth & a position of gravitational stability between the Earth and sun called the Lagrange Point Two, or L2.From there, Euclid is designed to explore the evolution of what astrophysicists refer to as the &dark universe,& using a wide-angle telescope to survey galaxies as far away as 10 billion light years from Earth across an immense expanse of the sky beyond our own Milky Way galaxy.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.The mission focuses on two foundational components of the dark universe.
One is dark matter, the invisible but theoretically influential cosmic scaffolding thought to give shape and texture to the cosmos.
The other is dark energy, an equally enigmatic force believed to explain why expansion of the universe, as scientists learned in the 1990s, has long been accelerating.The possibilities of the mission are reflected by the enormity of Euclid's inquiry.
Scientists estimate dark energy and dark matter together make up 95% of the cosmos, while ordinary matter that we can see accounts for just 5%.The post Europe's Euclid space telescope launched on mission to explore ‘dark universe& first appeared on Ariana News.