The ESA EUCLID telescope, developed with the strong support of ASI, will focus its eye on billions of #galaxies across 10 billion years of cosmic history.
After the calibration phase, EUCLID successfully started its six years’ scientific mission. During this time the satellite will map about one third of the #celestialvault. Scientists are ready to discover the ‘unrevealed’ #energy that has controlled the Universe since the beginning of its creation.
The #firsttask will be to observe a 130 square degree portion of the sky in the southern celestial hemisphere. This is a region equivalent to more than 500 times the area of the full Moon in the sky.
OHB Italia S.p.A. Italia developed the sophisticated #electronicspayload, which represents the #brain of the system. It has also designed and built the #grismwheel of the NISP (Near Infrared Spectro-Photometer) instrument, which will position the grisms (a combination of a prism and a grating arranged so that only a specific wavelength will pass through) in the optical beam.
EUCLID was placed in an orbit 1.5 million km from Earth (the #LagrangianPoint2, called L2, where the James Webb Space Telescope is also located), an ideal place to observe the universe, as the attraction of the Sun and Earth balance each other out, providing a very#stableviewpoint.
The ESA telescope will perform an #observationmode called ‘step and stare’, which consists of ‘fixing’ an area of the sky for about 70 minutes, producing very detailed images, and then moving on to the next area: during the entire mission, EUCLID will carry out more than 40,000 of these acquisitions.
EUCLID will observe the shape of about 50,000 galaxies in one shot with the necessary precision and will detect many #faintgalaxies.
The satellite will supply a #revolutionarylook at the most mysterious ingredients of the cosmos: #darkmatter and #darkenergy, which represents around 95 per cent of the universe.
Stay tuned for further update!
Picture credit: ESA – Cc By-S 3.0 Igo
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