Global Courant
A European space telescope will take off from Florida in the US on July 1 on a quest to find the answer to one of the biggest questions in science: what is the Universe made of?
The Euclid mission will make a large three-dimensional map of the cosmos in an effort to discover some of the properties of so-called dark matter and energy.
Together, these phenomena are believed to control the shape and expansion of everything in the universe. However, researchers admit that they know almost nothing about them. Neither dark matter nor dark energy can be directly detected.
This huge gap in human knowledge means we can’t really explain our origins, says Professor Isobel Hook. The observations of the Euclid telescope represent the best possibility of moving towards understanding this origin, believes the astronomer at the University of Lancaster in the United Kingdom.
“It will be like setting off on a ship before people knew where there was land on different sides (of the planet). We will map the universe to try to understand where we fit into it and how we got here,” she told BBC News.
The €1.4 billion Euclid telescope is expected to launch at 5:12 a.m. on July 1. It will be sent to an observation position about 1.5 million kilometers from Earth, on the opposite side of the planet from the Sun.
Although this project is mainly managed by the European Space Agency (ESA), the mission also has important scientific and engineering data from the American space agency (NASA).
Previous experiments have suggested that dark energy makes up about 70 percent of all energy in the Universe; dark matter about 25 percent; while all visible matter – such as stars, gas, dust, planets and humans – makes up about 5 percent.
To unravel the nature of energy and dark matter, the Euclid telescope will conduct a six-year investigation.
Its main task will be to map the distribution of dark matter, matter that cannot be detected directly, but which astronomers know is there due to the effects of gravity./REL
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