ESA's Euclid Telescope to Launch Saturday

This Saturday morning, July 1, at 11:11 ET or 1511 UTC, the European Space Agency's Euclid space telescope will take a ride to orbit on a SpaceX Falcon 9 from SLC-40 at Cape Canaveral SFS.  

I've only just barely touched on the Euclid telescope, once back in October of '22.  Euclid is headed for the L2 LaGrange Point (graphic of the LaGrange points), where the James Webb Space Telescope is deployed and a growing number of satellites seem to use.  It was originally scheduled to ride a Soyuz 2.1 rocket, until the Russian invasion of Ukraine when the ESA cancelled the contract.  The selection of SpaceX over the ESA's own Ariane 6 is due to the issues they're having with that booster. 

On October 20th, European Space Agency (ESA) director Josef Aschbacher announced that the ESA will contract with SpaceX to launch two important science probes, the Euclid telescope and Hera, a multi-spacecraft mission to a near-Earth asteroid, after all domestic alternatives fell through. The move was due to delays in qualifying the Ariane 6 booster.  

Euclid is a small near-infrared space telescope that has been in development since the early 20-teens.  It is to be launched to the same Earth-Sun Lagrange point as the James Webb Space Telescope, L2.  The Webb is a much broader spectrum instrument from near infrared out to far infrared wavelengths, so they're not competitors; more like extra capability out at L2 for the near-infrared spectrum.  

The other mission, Hera, is considerably more ambitious.  Hera’s mission is to orbit around the near-Earth asteroid Didymos and study the impact crater on its smaller partner, Dimorphos, created by the DART mission. Hera has a short, 17-day launch window in October of 2024.

This will be the 2nd furthest mission SpaceX has initially launched, behind only the DART mission back in November of '21, which was sent 11 million km to intercept the asteroid moon Dimorphos.  By the launch of Hera in another 16 months, we'll find out how that distance compares.

The ESA's mission website offers this, that I'll use for the closing words. 

Euclid is designed to explore the evolution of the dark Universe. It will make a 3D-map of the Universe (with time as the third dimension) by observing billions of galaxies out to 10 billion light-years, across more than a third of the sky.