«We are entering a new era, where we will see things impossible to see otherwisesays David Elbaz, Scientific Director of the CEA’s Astrophysics Department, member of the Euclid consortium. And there are many hopes, as mentioned on February 21 in Cannes (Alpes-Maritimes) at Thales Alenia Space (TAS), prime contractor for the satellite, the various managers of this program piloted by the European Space Agency (ESA) with a budget of 1.4 billion euros. Its project manager, Giuseppe Racca, summarizes the dizzying scientific dimension: “The satellite will observe the expansion of the universe on the latest 10 billion years, when stars and galaxies formed. Over the six-year mission, we will scan 36% of the sky».
Thanks to the equipment on board the satellite – including the telescope provided by Airbus Defense & Space and the TAS service module – all hope to understand the characteristics of dark energy and dark matter, which constitute 95% of the universe, by exploring them as closely as possible to probe their interactions with galaxies and the expansion of the universe. They admit, in confidence, that if these observations might confirm hypotheses put forward throughout the history of cosmology, they would be disappointed not to discover the unexpected.
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