European Space Agency's Euclid telescope launches from Florida, US

 
Correction — July 13, 2023
 
Earth-Sun Lagrange point L₂ is beyond Earth's orbit of the Sun, not between the two bodies, as this article incorrectly states.
 

Sunday, July 2, 2023 

Yesterday, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, with the European Space Agency's (ESA) Euclid space telescope aboard, launched at 11:12 AM EDT (1512 UTC) from Cape Canaveral Space Launch Complex 40 in Florida, US. Euclid was to study dark matter, dark energy, and the expansion of the universe.

An artist's impression of Euclid.
Image: ESA.

Costing €1.4 billion, Euclid was to spend about a month traveling around 1,500,000 kilometers (932,057 mi) to the Lagrange point L₂ between the Earth and the Sun, the area of the James Webb Space Telescope. There, it would observe about a third of the sky beyond the Milky Way for six years.

NASA designed and built Euclid's Near Infrared Spectrometer and Photometer, and NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, with a tentative launch date of May 2027, was to provide more refined data scientists could use to correct Euclid's. IPAC senior research scientist Yun Wang stated Euclid and Roman would "add up to much more than the sum of their parts [...] Combining their observations will give astronomers a better sense of what's actually going on in the universe."

Before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Euclid was scheduled for launch from French Guiana on a Russian Soyuz rocket in March 2023.

Sources

• Jonathan Amos. "Euclid: Europe's 'dark explorer' telescope launches" — BBC, July 1, 2023
• Elizabeth Howell. "SpaceX rocket launches Euclid space telescope to map the 'dark universe' like never before (video)" — Space.com, July 1, 2023
• Ashley Balzer. "NASA's Roman and ESA's Euclid Will Team Up To Investigate Dark Energy" — NASA, June 27, 2023