The Euclid Spacecraft is scheduled to enter orbit on 1 July to determine the properties of dark energy and dark matter on universal scales.
The Euclid, which will launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 launch vehicle from Cape Canaveral, Florida, USA, includes a visible wavelength camera as part of its payload module. The camera includes 36 Teledyne e2v sensors designed and manufactured by Teledyne’s team of highly experienced engineers, technicians and scientists.
Euclid is designed to explore the evolution of the dark universe. Over six years, it will make a 3D-map of the universe by observing billions of galaxies out to 10 billion light-years, across more than a third of the sky. Euclid will provide further understanding of what dark energy and dark matter actually are, and the mission will help to determine how the universe originated and what it is made of.
Six year operation
Its operational orbit will be a halo around a point known as the Sun-Earth Lagrange point 2, at an average distance of 1.5 million km beyond Earth’s orbit. It will initially fly for 30 days for instrument testing followed by an operational lifetime of six years, with the possibility of extension.
Gabriela Druitt, Director of Engineering for Space Imaging at Teledyne e2v, who worked on Dark Matter research prior to starting at Teledyne e2v, noted, “I think this is one of the most exciting missions that we have worked on to date. The Euclid mission will help us understand the fundamental physical laws of the Universe. It will reveal what dark energy and dark matter is and how the universe is changing. Dark matter can have some interesting applications, such as enabling futuristic space travel which would enable humankind to break current challenges that are associated with it.”
Euclid consortium
Euclid is a European mission, built and operated by The European Space Agency, with contributions from NASA. Teledyne e2v is part of the Euclid consortium consisting of more than 2,000 scientists from 300 institutes in 13 European countries, the US, Canada and Japan.
