Iran Press/ Sci & Tech: The orbital telescope was built to shed light on mysterious cosmic phenomena known as dark energy and dark matter, unseen forces scientists say account for 95% of the known universe.
New insights from the $1.4 billion mission, designed to last at least six years, are expected to transform astrophysics and perhaps understanding of the very nature of gravity itself.
If all goes as planned, Euclid will be released after a short ride to space for a month-long voyage to its destination in solar orbit nearly 1 million miles (1.6 million km) from Earth - a position of gravitational stability between the Earth and the sun called the Lagrange Point Two, or L2.
From there, Euclid is designed to explore the evolution of what astrophysicists refer to as the "dark universe," using a wide-angle telescope to survey galaxies as far away as 10 billion light-years from Earth across an immense expanse of the sky beyond our own Milky Way galaxy.
Euclid was designed and built entirely by ESA, with the U.S. space agency, NASA, supplying photo detectors for its near-infrared instrument. The Euclid Consortium overall comprises more than 2,000 scientists from 13 European nations, the U.S., Canada and Japan.
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