2023-06-21, Euclid Consortium

Euclid will be launched on Saturday, 1^st July 2023

ESA and SpaceX are targeting 11:12 a.m. EDT (17:12 CEST, 15:12 UTC) Saturday, July 1, with a backup date on Sunday, July 2, to launch the ESA’s Euclid mission from Cape Canaveral, Florida, to the Earth-Sun Lagrange point 2 (L2) on a SpaceX Falcon 9.

Within a month Euclid will reach its destination from which it will observe one third of the sky enabling scientists to study the last 10 billion years of the Universe’s evolution and therefore, investigate the nature of dark matter and dark energy. During its journey, the telescope and the instruments will be turned on, the telescope focused, and the instruments tested. After a subsequent calibration phase of two months, Euclid will start its 6-year science operations.

“We are there, after 12 years of technical development and scientific preparation, and we now are moving to second phase of the mission that will tell us what is the very nature of dark energy” said Yannick Mellier, Euclid’s Consortium Lead and astrophysicist at the Institut d’astrophysique de Paris in France.

Euclid is an ESA mission with large contributions from industrials and the Euclid consortium, an organisation that brings together about 2000 scientists in 300 laboratories in 17 different countries in Europe, USA, Canada and Japan. It is responsible for designing and building the NISP and VIS instruments, for gathering all ground-based complementary data, developing the survey strategy and the data processing pipeline to produce all calibrated images and catalogues and the scientific exploitation of the data.

Press inquiries:
Audrey Le Reun, press@euclid-ec.org (EC EPO lead)

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