At Cape Canaveral, everything is ready for Saturday's launch of Euclid, the European Space Agency's €1.4 billion mission designed to find out what dark matter and energy that occupy 95% of the universe are made of. The departure is scheduled for 17:12 Italian time, with a Falcon 9 rocket of Elon Musk's SpaceX company.
Italy collaborates in this mission in an important way under the guidance of the Italian Space Agency, with the National Institute of Astrophysics, the National Institute of Nuclear Physics and numerous universities, including those of Bologna, Ferrara, Turin, Genoa, Salento and Trieste, University of Milan, Sapienza of Rome, Roma Tre, Sissa and Cisas. ASI, with Inaf and Infn, also leads the temporary Association of Companies that contributed to the instruments, with Ohb Italia mandataria, Sab Aerospace and Temis principals.
After launch, Euclid will travel for about a month to get to 1.5 million kilometers from Earth, in the so-called Lagrange point 2 (L2), where the influence of Earth, Moon and Sun are balanced and the satellite can work undisturbed. Once it arrives at its destination, it will take another two months to test and calibrate the scientific instruments with which it will create the largest and most precise 3D map of the Universe.
"In the next six years Euclid will observe about a third of the sky, building huge maps both of the distribution of galaxies, and therefore of the matter visible to us, and of the matter whose presence we notice only through its gravitational effects, and therefore obscures", explains Luigi Guzzo, professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the State University of Milan and one of the founders, as well as scientific coordinator of the project. "We can think of Euclid as a great cartographic project, which will reconstruct the geography of a huge part of the Universe around us. Euclid will produce a database of images, measurements and information about billions of galaxies over a third of the visible sky, leaving an invaluable legacy for researchers in the coming decades."