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CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla., July 1 (UPI) -- A European spacecraft to map the universe through observations of billions of galaxy clusters lifted off Saturday from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying the Euclid spacecraft launched at 11:12 am EDT.
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The Falcon 9's booster stage separated from the rest of the spacecraft about 2 minutes and 43 seconds after launch.
The booster stage returned to Earth and made a successful landing on the A Shortfall of Gravitas drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean about 8 minutes and 40 seconds after launch.
A Space Force forecast prior to the launch indicated that weather would not be an issue.
NASA began coverage of the $1.5 billion mission at 10:30 a.m. on NASA-TV.
Called Euclid, the deep space observatory's ultimate task is to look for and observe phenomena that establish the presence of so-called dark matter and dark energy throughout the universe.
Scientists say that dark matter is impossible to detect with instruments designed to intercept electromagnetic radiation. So, astrophysicists must rely on gravity from large celestial bodies, such as galaxies.
A significant phenomenon that can be observed is how gravity redirects light, a warping effect called lensing. A larger mass means a stronger warping effect.
Images of distant light sources generated by light look distorted. When those nearer "lensing" objects are massive galaxies or galaxy clusters, background sources can appear smeared or form multiple images.
That leads to conclusions that dark matter exists, even though it doesn't give off light and doesn't reflect it or absorb it, either. In sum, direct evidence is nowhere to be found.
To carry out its mission, 15.4-foot-high Euclid telescope must fly to a point 1 million miles from Earth. That's where it will remain suspended between Earth and the sun -- where the gravity of both celestial bodies balance out each other.
From that stable parking spot, the spacecraft will survey galaxies at distances as far out as 10 billion light years.
Astrophysicists expect to establish how the universe expanded and its structure shaped over billions of years. And scientists expect to establish how dark energy and dark matter work.
Euclid is entirely a European mission created by the European Space Agency, in cooperation with NASA, in a consortium that involves 2,000 scientists and 300 institutes in 13 European countries, the United States, Canada and Japan -- which provided scientific instruments and data analysis.
ESA chose Thales Alenia Space as its prime contractor to build the satellite, while Airbus Defense and Space developed the scientific instruments section, telescope included. NASA provided the near-infrared (heat) detectors for one of the instruments.
NASA plans involve launching Roman, a telescope similar to Euclid, around 2025. The two missions' surveys will overlap, with Euclid likely observing the whole area Roman will scan.
Scientists will use Roman's more sensitive and accurate data to apply corrections to Euclid's, incorporating them over Euclid's much larger area.
"Euclid's first look at the broad region of sky it will survey will inform the science, analysis, and survey approach for Roman's deeper dive," said Mike Seiffert, project scientist for the NASA contribution to Euclid at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.
"Together, Euclid and Roman will add up to much more than the sum of their parts," said Yun Wang, a senior research scientist at Caltech/IPAC in Pasadena., who has led galaxy clustering science groups for Euclid and Roman.
"Combining their observations will give astronomers a better sense of what's actually going on in the universe."
Euclid was supposed to be launched last year on a Russian Soyuz rocket, but after that nation's invasion of Ukraine, ESA canceled the launch and terminated its collaboration with Russia.
