Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

CTOnews.com, August 1 (Xinhua)-- on the morning of July 1, local time, the US space exploration technology company Falcon 9 rocket was launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force Base in Florida with the European Space Agency's $1.5 billion (CTOnews.com Note: about 10.725 billion yuan) Euclid space telescope. The space telescope aims to draw a "three-dimensional map" of the universe by observing the distribution of billions of distant galaxies, revealing the reasons for the accelerated expansion of the universe and dark matter, dark energy and other problems.

A month after being launched into orbit, the space telescope began its first shooting and data collection of the universe. To the relief of the scientists, the telescope seems to be working well.

As part of a months-long commissioning phase, the telescope's visible and infrared cameras have begun to take pictures of the universe. The scientists involved in the development of the cameras say the performance of the new devices is excellent. The VIS camera can take clear images of billions of galaxies and measure their shapes in the visible light range (550nm to 900nm). The NISP camera is a near-infrared spectrometer and photometer that can measure the distance and velocity of galaxies in the near-infrared range (920-2000 nm).

"We are pleased to see that the commissioning phase of the Euclid mission is progressing smoothly," said Alessandra Roy, Euclid project manager at the German space agency DLR. "the spacecraft will soon reach its final position of 1.5 million kilometers from Earth and begin scientific observation."

The main mirror of the telescope is 1.2 meters in diameter, about half the diameter of the Hubble Space Telescope. Unlike Hubble, Euclid is not designed to observe astronomical phenomena such as individual galaxies or stars in detail. Instead, it aims to observe vast areas of the sky in order to gain a more comprehensive understanding of the universe. Over its six-year design life, the telescope will survey about 36% of the sky.

Euclid will look at a large number of galaxies in the universe, detect their shapes, and try to observe distortions that may be caused by mysterious, hidden matter. Scientists believe that the matter we can see in the night sky accounts for only about 5% of the matter in the universe-mainly stars and galaxies. What about the rest? This is the main question that Euclid is trying to answer.

Over the past two decades or so, scientists have come to realize that dark or hidden matter accounts for about 25% of the mass of the universe. The rest of the mass, more than 2/3 of the universe, is something called dark energy, a currently unknown force that accelerates the expansion of the universe.

Understanding what dark matter is made of, or just confirming its existence, would be a great advance in the fields of physics and cosmology. Physicists are also eager to better understand the nature of dark energy, which can only be inferred by its impact on the rapidly expanding universe.

When fully calibrated, Euclid will observe billions of galaxies in the night sky and provide data to create a three-dimensional map of the universe. Euclid was one of the first space telescopes designed after the discovery of dark energy, so scientists hope it will provide critical data to reveal the truth about these mysterious matter.

The European Space Agency and its partners, including NASA, will continue to test and inspect the telescope and its scientific instruments in the coming months. After verifying that the telescope is in good condition after launch and deployment, the scientific phase of the mission will officially begin later this year.

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