Swiss expertise in space exploration: Euclidean mission to unravel the mysteries of dark matter

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On July 1, the Euclidean telescope is launched into space. Over the next six years, the mission will create the largest and most accurate 3D map of the universe to date. Swiss institutions are also participating in the mission.

“We are very curious if everything will go well in the beginning,” said Martin Melchior, of the Northwest Switzerland University of Applied Sciences (FHNW), when asked by the Keystone-SDA news agency. The launch is a big step for the researcher: she has been involved in the preparation of the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Euclidean mission since 2010.

Scientists want to use the new telescope to create a map of the universe made up of billions of galaxies located ten billion light-years away.

Together with his colleagues, Melchior developed the software infrastructure that enables the management and distribution of data through a global data network. “After the start, I hope everything will go smoothly and there won’t be too many fire drills,” Melchior said.

How did the universe evolve?

The mission contains an incredible amount of data. “Euclid himself will send about a petabyte of data to Earth,” Melchior said. But this is by no means all the data to be produced. Euclidean data is linked to data from other tasks, sometimes copies are made and other data is created during processing. “We expect a total of 150 petabytes of data,” continues Melchior. This corresponds to approximately 12 million years of HD quality video. Or triple all the works written by man in all languages.

Scientists hope to use this data to gain insight into dark matter. It is well known that dark energy accelerates the expansion of the universe and that dark matter influences the formation of cosmic structures, but what exactly dark energy and matter are is still a mystery. The mission’s goal is to understand how the universe has evolved over the last 10 billion years.

In addition to the FHNW, Switzerland also includes the University of Zurich (UZH), the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) in Lausanne, and the University of Geneva (Unige). Around 2,000 engineers and scientists from 200 research institutes in 15 countries are interested in “Euclid”. According to ESA, it is the largest astronomical consortium in history.

Initially, “Euclid” should have started with a Russian Soyuz rocket. However, due to the war in Ukraine, space cooperation between Europe and Russia was broken in March 2022. Now the telescope will be launched into space with the Space X rocket. (SDA)

Source : Blick