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| This artist's concept shows the Euclid spacecraft. The telescope will launch to an orbit around the sun-Earth Lagrange point L2. The Lagrange point is a location where the gravitational pull of two large masses, the sun and Earth in this case, precisely equals the force required for a small object, such as the Euclid spacecraft, to maintain a relatively stationary position behind Earth as seen from the sun. [Image credit: ESA/C. Carreau] |
Washington: NASA has joined the European Space Agency's (ESA's) Euclid
mission, a space telescope designed to investigate the cosmological mysteries
of dark matter and dark energy.
Euclid will launch in
2020 and spend six years mapping the locations and measuring the shapes of as
many as 2 billion galaxies spread over more than one-third of the sky. It will
study the evolution of our universe, and the dark matter and dark energy that
influence its evolution in ways that still are poorly understood.
The telescope will
launch to an orbit around the sun-Earth Lagrange point L2. The Lagrange point
is a location where the gravitational pull of two large masses, the sun and
Earth in this case, precisely equals the force required for a small object,
such as the Euclid spacecraft, to maintain a relatively stationary position
behind Earth as seen from the sun.
"NASA is very
proud to contribute to ESA's mission to understand one of the greatest science
mysteries of our time," said John Grunsfeld, associate administrator for
NASA's Science Mission Directorate at the agency's Headquarters in Washington.
NASA and ESA recently
signed an agreement outlining NASA's role in the project. NASA will contribute
16 state-of-the-art infrared detectors and four spare detectors for one of two
science instruments planned for Euclid.
"ESA’s Euclid
mission is designed to probe one of the most fundamental questions in modern
cosmology, and we welcome NASA’s contribution to this important endeavor, the
most recent in a long history of cooperation in space science between our two
agencies," said Alvaro Giménez, ESA’s Director of Science and Robotic
Exploration.
In addition, NASA has
nominated three U.S. science teams totaling 40 new members for the Euclid
Consortium. This is in addition to 14 U.S. scientists already supporting the
mission. The Euclid Consortium is an international body of 1,000 members who
will oversee development of the instruments, manage science operations, and
analyze data.
Euclid will map the
dark matter in the universe. Matter as we know it -- the atoms that make up the
human body, for example -- is a fraction of the total matter in the universe.
The rest, about 85 percent, is dark matter consisting of particles of an
unknown type. Dark matter first was postulated in 1932, but still has not been
detected directly. It is called dark matter because it does not interact with
light. Dark matter interacts with ordinary matter through gravity and binds
galaxies together like an invisible glue.
While dark matter
pulls matter together, dark energy pushes the universe apart at ever-increasing
speeds. In terms of the total mass-energy content of the universe, dark energy
dominates. Even less is known about dark energy than dark matter.
Euclid will use two
techniques to study the dark universe, both involving precise measurements of
galaxies billions of light-years away. The observations will yield the best
measurements yet of how the acceleration of the universe has changed over time,
providing new clues about the evolution and fate of the cosmos.