Sunday, July 2, 2023, 4:48 p.m.
The Euclid spacecraft of the ESA (European Space Agency) took off this Saturday on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. The successful launch marks the beginning of a mission aimed at revealing the nature of two mysterious components of the universe, dark matter and dark energy.
The project has been preparing for ten years and has an investment of more than 1,400 million euros. The ‘Euclid’ instruments, when observing from space, will generate images with a much higher sharpness than those obtained with terrestrial telescopes, which are clouded by the atmosphere. It is expected to capture billions of galaxies as far away as 10 billion light-years to create the most accurate and extensive 3D map of the universe, with time representing the third dimension.
More than 300 institutions from 21 countries participate in the mission, as well as 80 companies (nine of them Spanish), a human capital amounting to 3,500 people. The participation of the Institute of Space Sciences of the CSIC, in Barcelona, and that of the European Center for Space Astronomy, ESA headquarters in Madrid, stand out.
