A seventy-metre-high Falcon 9 rocket blasted the European space telescope Euclid into space in Florida on Saturday. The launch was closely followed in DOT in Groningen. The mission has been worked on for years, also by Groningen residents.
Loud applause sounds at two minutes to six in the multifunctional center in the Groningen city center. Students, scientists and other interested parties were remarkably calm when at a quarter past five the rocket shot up from Capa Canaveral with a huge fireball. Because the elevator off is one thing, but making contact with the satellite is quite another. If that doesn’t work, it’s all for nothing.
“The satellite is talking to us! Now let’s toast. Let’s go to the cava”, Groningen astronomer Gijs Verdoes Kleijn exclaims enthusiastically, while the image of Euclid on the giant screen in DOT slowly shrinks. “Wow, this makes me emotional.”
Huge vibrations
His colleague Edwin Valentijn, professor of astronomical information technology at the University of Groningen, has just explained to the public that it is not a one-two punch that an artificial moon can make contact with the earth immediately after launch. Such a satellite has been thoroughly tested. But it undergoes enormous vibrations at launch. You just have to wait and see if everything works well.”
“We have been working on this for years. The time has finally come”, his colleague Karina Caputi, astronomer and professor at the RUG, applauds. “Euclid shows us the big picture to see. The satellite looks at 400,000 galaxies, including 50 that are very old. The light we see from these galaxies today was very young when the universe was formed. We are now opening a very large window on space.”
The satellite is named after the Greek mathematician Euclid of Alexandria, the founder of geometry. More than 2,700 scientists from 300 scientific institutes are collaborating on the European Space Agency’s project for the super telescope. Not only in Europe, also in the US, Australia and Canada. It is a very ambitious program. The main goal is to thoroughly map the universe over a period of five years and thus collect an enormous amount of data.
Mysterious phenomenon
All this data – which is stored and processed in Groningen, among other places – should provide new insights into the most mysterious phenomenon in space: dark matter and dark energy. It is not visible, but its presence can be inferred from its influence on gravity. Scientists believe that the 95 percent of the invisible matter in the universe consists mainly of this energy.
Astronomers in Groningen have high expectations of the project. “Euclid is our baby,” says Valentijn. “It’s really the mission about our dark matter and energy questions. We don’t know what that is, just that there’s an additional force that we don’t know about. There are many speculations. We just know it’s about gravity. With Euclid we try to collect as much data as possible in five years to solve the puzzle. We’re building a universe in our computer.”
Nobel Prizes
Also in Darmstadt, at the European space headquarters from where the space telescope will soon be controlled, the enthusiasm knows no bounds. “Nobel prizes will soon be won with this wonderful science,” ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher cheers on the live stream.
Actually, a Soyuz rocket would launch the European satellite into space. After the Russian invasion of Ukraine, ESA had to quickly look for another launch vehicle. It was found at Elon Musk’s SpaceX company. His two-stage Falcon has become a space workhorse and is used extensively. What is special is that a large part of the rocket falls back to earth after launch and ends up on a platform in the Atlantic Ocean. This way it can be used again.