European Space Agency's Euclid telescope launches from Florida, US

An artist's impression of Euclid. Image: ESA.Yesterday, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, with the European Space Agency's (ESA) Euclid space telescope aboard, launched at 11:12 AM EDT (1512 UTC) from Cape Canaveral Space Launch Complex 40 in Florida, US. Euclid was to study dark matter, dark energy, and the expansion of the universe. Costing €1.4 billion, Euclid was to spend about a month traveling around 1,500,000 kilometers (932,057 mi) to the Lagrange point L2 between the Earth and the Sun, the area of the James Webb Space Telescope. There, it would observe about a third of the sky beyond the Milky Way for six years. NASA designed and built Euclid's Near Infrared Spectrometer and Photometer, and NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, with a tentative launch date of May 2027, was to provide more refined data scientists could use to correct Euclid's. IPAC senior research scientist Yun Wang stated Euclid and Roman would "add up to much more than the sum of their parts [...] Combining their observations will give astronomers a better sense of what's actually going on in the universe." Before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Euclid was scheduled for launch from French Guiana on a Russian Soyuz rocket in March 2023. Source: https://en.wikinews.org, available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Lice...
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Hubble captures the start of a new 'spoke' season of Saturn: NASA

FEB 14, 2023 In a latest image of Saturn captured by National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA's) Hubble Space Telescope, the appearance of spokes on the planet's rings heralded the start of a new 'spoke' season, according to a statement by NASA. Scientists will be looking for clues to explain the cause and nature of the spokes, the statement said. The suspected culprit for the spokes is the planet's variable magnetic field, the statement said. Planetary magnetic fields interact with the solar wind, creating an electrically charged environment. On Earth, when those charged particles hit the atmosphere this is visible in the northern hemisphere as the aurora borealis, or northern lights, NASA said. Scientists think that the smallest, dust-sized icy ring particles can become charged as well, which temporarily levitates those particles above the rest of the larger icy particles and boulders in the rings, NASA said. Like Earth, Saturn is tilted on its axis and therefore has four seasons, though because of Saturn's much larger orbit, each season lasts approximately seven Earth years, the space agency said. Equinox occurs when the rings are tilted edge-on to the Sun. The spokes disappear when it is near summer or winter solstice on Saturn, which is when the Sun appears to reach either its highest or lowest latitude, respectively,...
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