Europa launches from the United States this Saturday to “conquer” the hidden side of the universe by sending the Euclid telescope into space as part of a mission with a Portuguese “imprint” of scientists, companies and engineers.
A European Space Agency (ESA) mission with NASA from the United States is scheduled for 16:11 (Lisbon time) from NASA’s Cape Canaveral base.
The telescope, named after the mathematician Euclid and equipped with two scientific instruments, will go into space along with the Falcon 9 rocket of the North American aerospace company SpaceX, owned by tycoon Elon Musk.
Portugal, a Member State of ESA since 2000, is the first to feature prominently in an ESA space mission as part of a consortium formed to develop, build and operate a telescope.
Scientists, engineers and companies are coming from Portugal to contribute to the mission in areas ranging from mission control to manufacturing various space telescope components and planning observations.
Thiago Loureiro, an aerospace engineer with 19 years of experience with ESA, will jointly manage the missions from Germany, home of ESA’s European Space Operations Centre.
This is the first space mission to try to understand what is actually accelerating the expansion of the universe and what cosmological theories say is due to dark energy, the mysterious force that opposes gravitational pull.
Together, dark energy and dark matter (invisible matter that neither emits nor absorbs light) make up 95% of the universe that has yet to be discovered.
To help “shine light” on the hidden universe, the Euclid telescope will make some 50,000 observations of galaxies over the course of its six-year mission, a job planned by the Institute of Astrophysics and Space Sciences. .
The telescope will observe billions of galaxies, in which dark matter and energy generate effects in their structure, shape, distribution, movement and evolution, over a third of the sky and “going back” up to 10 billion years.
Euclid will be placed 1.5 million kilometers from Earth, at a stable point, without interference from the light of the planet, the Moon and the Sun, where he will arrive a month after launch.
The first image release is expected in November and the first scientific data in December 2024.
If the launch this Saturday fails, there will be a second chance on Sunday.
The launch of the Euclid telescope was scheduled for 2020 and then for 2022 from the ESA base in French Guiana on a Russian Soyuz rocket.
However, in 2022, the ESA severed relations with Russia when that country invaded Ukraine in February.
Author: Portuguese
Source: CM Jornal
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