Why in News?
The Euclid Space Telescope is prominently in the news because the European Space Agency (ESA) officially released the largest and most detailed visible-light image ever captured of the Milky Way’s core.
Important Information
- Released on June 24, 2026, the historic wide-field mosaic reveals more than 60 million stars, dense nebulae, and molecular clouds packed into the galactic bulge.
- This extraordinary dataset acts as a "cosmic magnifying glass" to help astronomers find and study exoplanets through gravitational microlensing.
Primary Scientific Mission
- Dark Universe Detective: Designed primarily to map the composition, evolution, and geometry of the "dark" ingredients of the universe.
- Dark Matter & Dark Energy: Investigates why the cosmic expansion of our universe is accelerating, aiming to reveal how dark matter acts as a gravitational glue and how dark energy drives things apart.
- Cosmic 3D Mapping: Tasked with creating the largest, most accurate 3D map of the universe across space and time by observing billions of distant galaxies up to 10 billion light-years away.
Launch, Trajectory & Location
- Launch Date & Vehicle: Successfully launched into space on 1 July 2023 aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida.
- Orbital Destination: Positioned in a halo orbit around the Sun-Earth Lagrange Point 2 (L2), hovering roughly 1.5 million kilometres (930,000 miles) beyond Earth.
- Mission Lifespan: Structured as a medium-class ("M-class") mission under ESA's Cosmic Vision campaign, with an active operational plan spanning at least six years.
Technical Capabilities & Instruments
- Aperture Size: Outfitted with a 1.2-metre diameter primary mirror telescope.
- Dual Instruments: Carries a Visible-light camera (VIS) to measure galaxy shapes and a Near-Infrared Spectrophotometer and Photometer (NISP) to gauge galaxy brightness and distances.
- Massive Sky Coverage: Over its operational life, it will survey one-third of the entire sky, avoiding the bright dust lanes of our own Milky Way to focus strictly on the extragalactic deep space.
- Data Deluge: Compresses and transmits roughly 100 gigabytes of deep-space data back to Earth every single day.
Download Pdf
