New satellite on a mission to map cosmos and reveal secrets of dark matter

A team from the University of Waterloo are among scientists around the world celebrating the successful launch of a first-of-its-kind satellite.

Designed to answer some of the universe’s biggest mysteries, the European Space Agency’s Euclid space telescope took off Saturday from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.

“Watching it take off yesterday and you think ‘Yep, that’s our baby sitting up there on the top of the rocket,” says University of Waterloo professor Mike Hudson.

Crowds on the beach in Cocoa Beach, Fla., watch the launch of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket for the European Space Agency with the Euclid space telescope on Saturday, July 1, 2023. The European space telescope blasted off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Saturday on a quest to explore the mysterious and invisible realm known as the dark universe. (Malcolm Denemark/Florida Today via AP)

Hudson and his University of Waterloo colleague Will Percival have been working on the project for over a decade.

In total, more than 2,000 scientists are involved, including four from the University of Waterloo.

WHAT IS THE EUCLID TELESCOPE DOING?

Euclid will spend more than six years in space creating a 3-D map of the cosmos.

The goal of the project is to better understand the properties of dark matter and why the universe continues to expand.

“[The expansion] is getting faster and this is just very difficult to explain. We don’t actually know what the answer is, we have some theories that could explain it and we call those theories ‘dark energy,” Percival says.

Hudson adds: “Is this dark energy some kind of mysterious energy? Or maybe the possibility that we don’t fully understand the laws of gravity?”

This photo provided by the European Space Agency on June 29, 2023 shows the Euclid space telescope being prepared for launch from Cape Canaveral, Fla. (ESA via AP)

NEW IMAGING TECHNOLOGY

What separates Euclid from its predecessors is its camera.

Scanning the sky, the technology is capable of taking 3-D images, allowing it map of billions of galaxies across more than a third of the sky.

“So you no longer have to just take your telescope and point at an object and say ‘I want an image of that object’. We get everything. There’s this opportunity to observe things that we don’t expect,” explains Percival.

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, with the European Space Agency Euclid space telescope, lifts off from pad 40 at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Cape Canaveral, Fla., Saturday, July 1, 2023. The Euclid mission is designed to explore the evolution of the dark universe. (AP Photo/John Raoux)

Euclid is expected to reach the point it will orbit around, 1.5 million kilometre from earth, in about a month.

Percival says the first batch of images could be relayed back to earth as early as the end of July.

“It’s a whole new territory and we’re mapping dark matter on scales that have never been done before,” Hudson says.