Euclid, the European mission to explore the unknown and dark universe, took off this Saturday aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida.
The launch took place at 15:12 GMT and, after separating from the rocket, Euclid will set course for the point known as Lagrange 2, at an average distance of 1.5 million kilometers from Earth -where telescopes such as Gaia and James Webb-.
From there, for six years, he will observe billions of galaxies at a distance of up to 10,000 million light years, in more than a third of the sky; The goal is to create the largest and most accurate 3D catalog of the universe to try to advance knowledge of the nature of matter and dark energy.
It has never been observed as far as this mission will, so one possibility is that the cosmological Standard Model works, but it could also be that alternative equations fit better.
Euclid, with a cost of 1,400 million euros (about 1,529 million dollars at current exchange rates) and with the participation of Spanish companies and research centers, is therefore designed to offer new data on the unknown and dark side of the universe.
With this three-dimensional map of the universe (time being the third dimension), information on the shapes, positions and distances of galaxies will be collected and will serve to advance knowledge of matter and dark energy, how the expansion of the universe has changed or in understanding gravity.
The normal matter is the one that integrates the planets, the galaxies or the stars and represents 5%; the rest is in the form of dark energy (about 70% of the cosmos) and dark matter (25%), different components that cosmology is still trying to explain.