Launch Of Euclid Spacecraft Brings Good News For Lancaster University Prof
Lancaster Professor Isobel Hook, who witnessed the successful launch of the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Euclid Satellite Mission, has described it as a “wonderful experience”.
The launch was on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket at NASA’s Kennedy Space Centre at Cape Canaveral in Florida on July 1.
Professor Hook said: “It was a wonderful experience to see the launch live. The flame from the rocket was much brighter than I expected and the sound was incredible – it gets louder and louder and goes right through you! It was such a relief for everyone involved to see Euclid safely on its way. Now we can look forward to the arrival of the first data.”
Professor Hook is an expert in Cosmology and distant supernovae, member of the Euclid Consortium Board, and joint leader of the Euclid Supernova & Transients Science Working Group.
She is one of an international team of thousands of scientists involved in the mission which will see Euclid travel over a million miles into space on its six year mission.
Euclid is designed to explore the composition and evolution of the dark universe. The space telescope will create a great map of the large-scale structure of the universe across space and time by observing billions of galaxies out to 10 billion light-years, across more than a third of the sky.
Euclid will explore how the universe has expanded and how structure has formed over cosmic history, revealing more about the role of gravity and the nature of dark energy and dark matter.
The galaxy and dark matter maps contain information about the expansion history of the universe and the evolution of the structure within it. By analysing these maps, astronomers will be able to determine the nature of both dark matter and dark energy.
To achieve this, the Euclid Consortium team will carry out a very precise and accurate analysis of the images and distances of 1.5 billion galaxies over one-third of the sky.
Gravitational lensing causes a one part in a hundred change in these galaxy images, which need to be measured from the sample to a precision of one part in a hundred-thousand, presenting a major data-analysis challenge. Euclid will also measure the spectrum of light from over 35 million galaxies to accurately measure their distance from Earth.
To carry this out the Euclid satellite hosts two state-of-the-art instruments, an optical camera (VIS) built in the UK, and a Near-Infrared (NISP) camera led by France. The VIS Instrument will take images as sharp as those from the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) to measure the gravitational lensing distortions. The NISP Instrument will take multicolour images and the spectrum of light of galaxies from which their distance can be measured. Euclid’s wide field of view and large instruments will allow it to image more area of sky in one day than HST in its first 25 years.
As well as breakthroughs in the fundamental physics of the universe, data from Euclid will provide a lasting legacy impacting almost all areas of astronomy. Being taken from space and hence free from distortions imparted by Earth’s atmosphere, Euclid’s images will be of exceptionally high resolution. The telescope’s wide field of view will allow a third of the sky to be viewed during the 6-year mission, and the high sensitivity of the VIS and NISP detectors, collecting optical and near-infrared light respectively, will give scientists a unique view out into space.