What’s Next for ESA’s Euclid Space Telescope After ‘Fantastic Launch’?

Europe Space Agency's (ESA) Euclid spacecraft just had a successful launch Saturday. For those following the European-built orbital satellite, read on to know what awaits it in the coming months.

What's Next For ESA's Euclid Spacecraft?

The first objective for Euclid, now that it is in orbit and communicating with Earth, is to position itself on a course for L2. About two days after launch, its course will be checked to ensure it travels in the appropriate direction.

During the first month of Euclid's space mission, it will fly to L2, where it will naturally cool to space temperature while having all its equipment tested for space. Engineers will next evaluate Euclid's performance compared to what we anticipate on the ground in months 2 and 3, Space.com reported.

After three months, we should be prepared to begin science observations, but even then, according to Euclid project manager Giuseppe Racca. He added that they still need to perform some specific calibration. Euclid will likely be finished in eight months if nothing goes wrong during the testing.

After its launch and travel to L2, which fortunately only encountered minor calibration challenges, the NASA James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) also underwent a lengthy calibration process. While Euclid will instead scan broad swathes of the sky for the bending of light around stars or galaxies, JWST is staring at teeny-tiny portions of the universe in incredibly fine detail. That is a blatant indication of a dark universe.

Racca stated that the image quality would be of particular concern to the crew because it can be impacted by factors like humidity, which is ironic given that Euclid launched from Florida on a typical rainy July dayHe claimed that our ability to see is affected by even a few nanometers of water ice in our opted.

Fortunately, there is a fallback strategy in case Euclid picks up some stray moisture. However, mission project scientist René Laureijs warned Space.com that it would be challenging.

According to him, if there is contamination, they must heat the satellite before cooling it again to drive the moisture out. In theory, we could do it. However, it will throw off our schedule.

The team will closely monitor Euclid to ensure it is prepared to map 15,000 square degrees or one-third of the sky swiftly. If the moisture must be eliminated, according to Laureijs, it will be challenging to do so before the survey is finished, but there is still room for it.

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What is Euclid?

Euclid is named after the Greek mathematician Euclid of Alexandria, who founded geometry. The Euclid spacecraft was launched to explore the dark universe scientists named the mission after him since the density of matter and energy is linked to the universe's geometry.

Euclid was launched in July 2023. European Space Agency director-general Josef Aschbacher said at a briefing after the launch that it was a "fantastic launch" from the insertion into orbit separation.

It will explore the billions of galaxies out to 10 billion light-years across more than a third of the sky, creating a 3D map of the universe (with time as the third dimension).

Scientists still need to learn what dark energy and dark matter is, even though dark energy speeds up the expansion of the Universe and dark matter controls how cosmic structures grow.

Euclid will show how the universe has evolved over the past 10 billion years and how the structure has developed throughout cosmic history. From this, astronomers can infer the characteristics of dark energy, dark matter, and gravity, revealing more about their precise nature.