KENNEDY CENTRE: A European-built orbital satellite was launched to space on Saturday from Florida on a mission to shed new light on the mysterious cosmic phenomena known as dark energy and dark matter, unseen forces scientists say account for 95 per cent of the known universe.

The telescope dubbed Euclid, named for the ancient Greek mathematician called the “father of geometry,” was carried aloft in the cargo bay of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that blasted off around 11am from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. A livestream of the liftoff was shown on Nasa TV.

New insights from the $1.4 billion European Space Agency (ESA) mission, designed to last at least six years, are expected to transform astrophysics and perhaps understanding of the very nature of gravity itself.

Following a short flight to space, Euclid was to be released from the Falcon for a month-long voyage to its destination in solar orbit nearly 1 million miles (1.6 million km) from Earth — a position of gravitational stability between the Earth and sun called the Lagrange Point Two, or L2.

From there, Euclid is designed to explore the evolution of what astrophysicists refer to as the “dark universe,” using a wide-angle telescope to survey galaxies as far away as 10 billion light years from Earth across an immense expanse of the sky beyond our own Milky Way galaxy.

The 2-ton spacecraft is also equipped with instruments designed to measure the intensity and spectrums of infrared light from those galaxies in a way that will precisely determine their distances.

Published in Dawn, July 2nd, 2023