In the Dark

I saw this little movie on the ESA Update page for Euclid and couldn’t resist sharing it here. It’s a montage of images from the Canada-France Hawaii Telescope (CFHT); the object you see moving upwards in the centre of the frame is none other than the Euclid spacecraft, hurtling towards its destination at the 2nd Lagrange Point. You will see other moving objects. I’m not sure what they are but the field is in the ecliptic plane so they’re likely to be small solar system objects, probably asteroids.

Incidentally, people keep asking me for updates about Euclid. Although I am privy to the regular updates available to members of the Euclid Consortium, I am not allowed to publish anything on here that’s not already in the public domain nor would I want to, lest anyone think I would presume to speak on behalf of either ESA or the Euclid Consortium via the medium of a personal blog. You can follow the official updates here from people who actually understand everything that is going on!

I will just say that all the key steps so far – a critical orbit manoeuvre needed to get into the correct trajectory for L2, a temporary rotation of the spacecraft to allow it to heat up and to allow residual gas to evaporate, deployment of the high-gain antenna (essential to send data back to Earth), and the switching on of the two instruments (NISP and VIS) – have taken place in good order. There is however a long way to go before everything is tested, verified, calibrated and ready for action. It’s a very busy time for the engineers and instrumentalists; we just need to give them the time they need to work their technical magic!

This entry was posted on July 16, 2023 at 7:47 pm and is filed under Euclid, The Universe and Stuff. 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.