All you need is a large-ish telescope 🔭, in this case the 3.6m Canada-France-Hawaii-Telescope on Maunakea, Hawai'i 🌋. 26 images of each 3min integration were combined into this video. Euclid had a distance of 920,000 km from Earth!
Here the very wide-field MegaCam on the CFHT #telescope was used, a camera 📷 that in its design was a precursor to #VIS, the wide-field visible wavelength instrument now onboard #ESAEuclid. How wide field? Well, the full area covered by MegaCam is about 80 times larger than the area shown in the video.
For anyone who would like to follow #ESAEuclid with their own telescope 🔭 in the sky, the satellite 🛰️ now has an entry in #NASA's #Horizon system. If you enter target body ID "-680" in their database at
#ESAEuclid has not yet been focussed, meaning that the secondary mirror ("M2") is in its safe position for launch and images would still be blurry 🔍. Focussing will take more than a week starting coming Monday.
Meanwhile the #VIS team has completed instrument #commissioning. ✅
All working well, both in space as well as on ground, some minor things are being investigated. A big step! 🎉
Update on #ESAEuclid#commissioning: while the whole spacecraft 🛰️ continues to cool down, the #VIS instrument checked out its electronics, shutter, and calibration lamp 💡 and they all react as expected. The #NISP instrument has rotated its filter and grism wheels 🎡 successfully.
Next up is full VIS & NISP commissioning, before the telescope 🔭 optics will undergo a week of alignment & focussing.
Isn't it getting really crowded at Sun-Earth ☀️ 🌎 Lagrange Point 2 (L2)? That's where #Gaia and #JWST already are and #ESAEuclid is now heading as well. 🛰️🛰️🛰️
Well, #GaiaSky has the answer: it's not. Distances are to scale.
Warm-up was done for a couple of days by tilting the spacecraft ~30° further towards the sun 🌞 than the normal position that Euclid will keep for its survey. This has been successfully completed, Euclid was tilted back, and is now cooling down 🥶.
How can one really be sure that #ESAEuclid is now a real #space 🛰️ mission? Well, it is once it has gone up on the historic named mission board in the control room at #ESA operations center ESOC in Darmstadt, Germany.
Those sites provide an increasing amount of background information, updates, and - at some point not too far in the future - actual sky observation data! 💫🕳️🌀✨🌙☄️
Update on #ESAEuclid 🛰️: the spacecraft - let's not call it an observatory or telescope yet - is doing fine. Safely cruising towards L2 beyond the Moon 🌕.
The "LEOP" (Launch and Early Orbit Phase) has been completed after a little less than 2 days and the first planned orbit correction maneuvre went well. Now the month-long "commissioning" phase started: instrument and telescope control computers have been turned on to monitor and regulate cooldown.
#ESAEuclid's initial "ride" is coming back: the 1st stage booster 🚀 that started the #Euclid satellite into #space on Saturday landed on a #SpaceX drone ship 🛶 and will arrive back at Port Canaveral in a few hours.
Obligatory visit to Maruhn’s Welt der Getränke in Pfungstadt before the drive home to The Netherlands 🍻
Thank you again to everyone at our European Mission Operations Centre in Darmstadt for your hospitality & deep professionalism over the weekend as ever.
Take good care of our #ESAEuclid spacecraft & hopefully we’ll see some photons from the distant universe soon so our scientists can start investigating the dark side 🛰️👍
Have you taken a look 👀 at our #EuclidConsortium website yet? You can find a primer on #ESAEuclid's instrumentation 🔭 , on the #cosmology questions we will study, as well as a glimpse into all the fields of #astronomy ✨ that the #Euclid data will also provide with an unprecented treasure trove of data.
#ESAEuclid has started it's 4week 1.5 million km journey to L2!
Signal acquired.
Perfect launch.
Huge congratulations to everyone @EC_Euclid@ESA_Euclid@esaoperations
I'm feeling quite emotional! Bravo!!
Congratulations to the team that make up the #Euclid mission on their successful launch! We can't wait to see what mysteries of the dark universe this space telescope will uncover.
It's launch day for the ESA Euclid space telescope.
Euclid will explore the dark Universe. It will make a 3D-map of the cosmos (with time as the 3rd dimension) by observing billions of galaxies out to 10 billion light-years, across more than a third of the sky.
Objectives:
How did the Universe originate? Why is the Universe expanding at an accelerating rate? What is the nature of dark matter? What is dark energy?
The ESA Euclid space telescope will point in a manner very similar to JWST - by rotating the entire spacecraft along 2 axes as shown in the graphic below, while keeping the telescope shielded from the sun.
Euclid will use a step-and-stare method; it will point and "stare" at a ~0.5 deg² area, take images and spectroscopic data and then "step" to the next position. It will take a year for a full scan of the target area, about 35% of the sky.
Signal from the Euclid spacecraft was received around 12:00 p.m. EDT at ESA's New Norcia ground station in Western Australia, shortly after separation from the stage 2 rocket.
The large detectors on the ESA Euclid space telescope will generate an enormous amount of data, over 100 GBytes per day.
The data will be downloaded (from 1.5 mil km away) using a K-band comm link at 73.85 Mbps.
Low rate X-band links will be used for command and control.
See table below for some info on the comm links.
By comparison, JWST uses a 0.6 m HGA at K-band for downlinking data at 7, 14 and 28 Mbit/s.