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, a European Space Agency instrument named for the ancient Greek mathematician called the "father of geometry," was bundled inside the cargo bay of a Falcon 9 rocket set for blast-off around 11 a.m. EDT from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.
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 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%.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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