ESA’s Euclid space telescope launch: All you need to know

economictimes.indiatimes.com:

European Space Agency (ESA) has successfully launched the Euclid space telescope on July 1 at 11:12 am ET. It was launched with the help of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. It reached orbit and sent a signal to mission control at 11:57 am ET.

Euclid is a 1.2-meter-diameter telescope that will travel to L2, about 1 million miles away from Earth. The telescope will spend two months calibrating its instruments before commencing a six-year survey of one-third of the sky.

The Euclid mission's main goal is to investigate the «dark side» of the universe, focusing on dark matter and dark energy. For those who don’t know, dark matter comprises 85 per cent of the universe's matter, however, it has never been directly observed, while dark energy is a mysterious force responsible for the universe's accelerating expansion. Euclid aims to create a highly accurate 3D map of the universe by observing billions of galaxies up to 10 billion light-years away. It will reveal how dark energy has influenced the stretching and separation of matter over cosmic time. Using visible and near-infrared measurements, Euclid will catalog 1.5 billion galaxies, providing data on their shapes, masses and star formation rates. It may also uncover new objects within our Milky Way galaxy.