In the Dark

O God, I could be bounded in a nut shell and count
myself a king of infinite space…

Hamlet, Act 2, Scene II.

It Hamlet rather than Euclid who said those words, but they came into my mind when I saw the latest nice video about the Euclid Mission from the European Space Agency, entitled Euclid in a Nutshell. It’s a quick one-minute summary of of what the mission is for and what it will do:

The text with the video reads:

ESA’s Euclid mission is designed to explore the composition and evolution of the dark Universe. The space telescope will create a great map of the large-scale structure of the Universe across space and time by observing billions of galaxies out to 10 billion light-years, across more than a third of the sky. Euclid will explore how the Universe has expanded and how structure has formed over cosmic history, revealing more about the role of gravity and the nature of dark energy and dark matter.

Euclid is a fully European mission, built and operated by ESA, with contributions from NASA. The Euclid Consortium – consisting of more than 2000 scientists from 300 institutes in 13 European countries, the US, Canada and Japan – provided the scientific instruments and scientific data analysis. ESA selected Thales Alenia Space as prime contractor for the construction of the satellite and its Service Module, with Airbus Defence and Space chosen to develop the Payload Module, including the telescope. NASA provided the near-infrared detectors of the NISP instrument.

This entry was posted on February 21, 2023 at 4:50 pm and is filed under Literature, The Universe and Stuff with tags Cosmology, Euclid, European Space Agency, Hamlet, Nutshell. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.