EUCLID MISSION
WHY IN NEWS ?
- Recently, the ESA’s Euclid space telescope lifted off from Cape Canaveral in Florida.
ABOUT EUCLID MISSION:
- Euclid is named after the Greek mathematician Euclid of Alexandria, who lived around 300 BC and founded the subject of geometry.
- As the density of matter and energy is linked to the geometry of the universe, the mission was named in his honour.
- The Euclid spacecraft is approximately 4.7 m tall and 3.7 m in diameter.
- It consists of two major components: the service module and the payload module.
- Its operational orbit will be halo around a point known as the Sun-Earth Lagrange point 2 (L2), at an average distance of 1.5 million km beyond Earth’s orbit.
- This special location keeps pace with Earth as we orbit the Sun (and also hosts ESA’s Gaia and Webb space telescopes).
- Nominal mission lifetime is six years, with the possibility of extension.
- The service module contains the satellite systems: electric power generation and distribution, attitude control, data processing electronics, propulsion, telecommand and telemetry, and thermal control.
OBJECTIVE OF THE MISSION:
- Euclid is designed to explore the evolution of the dark Universe. It will make a 3D-map of the Universe (with time as the third dimension) by observing billions of galaxies out to 10 billion light-years, across more than a third of the sky.
- Euclid is an ESA mission to map the geometry of the Universe and better understand the mysterious dark matter and dark energy.
- The mission will investigate the distance-redshift relationship and the evolution of cosmic structures by measuring shapes and redshifts of galaxies.
- In this way, Euclid will cover the entire period over which dark energy played a significant role in accelerating the expansion of the Universe.
- Euclid’s image quality will be at least four times sharper than that achieved by ground-based sky surveys.
- Euclid will build up a large archive of unique data, unprecedented by volume for a space-based mission, enabling research over all disciplines in astronomy.
SYLLABUS: PRELIMS, CURRENT AFFAIRS
