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

July 2, 2023

Yesterday, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, with the European Space Agency's (ESA)  aboard, launched at 11:12 AM  (1512 UTC) from  in Florida, US. Euclid was to study dark matter,, and the.



Costing €1.4 billion, Euclid was to spend about a month traveling around to the  L2 between the Earth and the Sun, the area of the. 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 and, and NASA's , with a tentative launch date of May 2027, was to provide more refined data scientists could use to correct Euclid's.  senior research scientist  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.