how to defrost a telescope remotely – Libération

2024-03-19 11:00:03

Space

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The performance of the European space telescope, which is intended to help understand the accelerated expansion of the universe, is affected by water molecules freezing on the surface of its mirrors. The European Space Agency will attempt a sophisticated remote defrosting operation.

Even space probes are entitled to their spring cleaning. Nine months following its arrival in space, the European telescope Euclid finds itself a little hampered by the ice which has accumulated on its optics, announces the European Space Agency (ESA), and it will have to be defrosted. Easier said than done, because it is obviously out of the question to send an astronaut-mechanic there with a small plastic squeegee. Everything will be done remotely.

Euclid took off at the beginning of July 2023 with an ambitious mission: it must map a third of the celestial vault, slice by slice for six years, by measuring the light of all the stars and galaxies that it can identify. Current galaxies, but also those from which we capture very old, very red light, emitted several billion years ago. The image of these ancient galaxies provides a snapshot of the universe in its young age. Euclid will thus catalog a good part of the lights of the universe in space but also in time, by “going back” approximately 73% of the 13.8 billion

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