SpaceX rocket launches Euclid space telescope to map the 'dark universe' | Hacker News Reader

SpaceX rocket launches Euclid space telescope to map the 'dark universe'

space.com

179 pointsgostsamo92 comments

Annoying article. Lots of words without saying what precisely it's going to do and how it's better than previous efforts. Much more information (23 thousand words!) is on the ESA website here: https://www.eoportal.org/satellite-missions/euclid

Euclid is a deep sky survey space telescope. Like many space telescopes, it's designed to run cold (-140C) to extend viewing into infrared bands ground telescopes can't access. It's like a mini-Webb, orbiting next to it out at L2, but with one twenty fifth of the mirror area, and ten thousand pounds less mass. (Of course, it was also $9 billion cheaper...) Being a sky survey instrument, it has a wider field of view than Webb, half a square degree versus 0.0025 sq deg.

It's something of a follow-on to ESA's Gaia astrometry space telescope, which surveyed the entire sky out to visual magnitude 20 and in 320–1000 nm light, while Euclid will specifically examine the 15,000 square degrees of the sky the Milky Way doesn't cover, out to magnitude 24.5 and in 550-2000 nm light. Both dimmer and more redshifted. (Fun trivia: both Gaia and Euclid are made entirely out of silicon carbide, including the optical bench and mirrors, which has become a ESA specialty.)

For another comparison, the first Sloan sky survey (using a 2.5m ground based telescope much bigger than Euclid) took 5 years to image 8,000 square degrees down to magnitude 22.2 and only out to 893 nm. Again, Euclid can see objects dimmer and more redshifted.

Unfortunately for ESA's press office, Euclid will not be producing a lot of pretty photos. It's a comparatively low resolution telescope designed specifically to look outside our galaxy (so no nebula photos) that only has three fairly broadband color filters on just one of the two instruments. (So none of the spectacular detail that some of Webb's narrowband filters can bring out) If it still has propellant after the first 6 year mission finishes then they might turn it around and image the Pillars of Creation but for the near future its fate is to transmit terabytes of photos of dim smudges for astronomers to do statistical analysis on.

Please write more science articles/summaries. This is really well done—great combination of info-heavy while being interesting and readable.

Fingers crossed, if all goes well, we may have in a few years remarkable new insights that we haven't had in fundamental physics for quite some time.

Vibes of the old COBE mission [1] that mapped for the first time the microwave background radiation and revolutionized cosmology.

https://science.nasa.gov/missions/cobe

Anyone else feel as if the title and first few paragraphs give more credit to SpaceX rather than the Euclid team?

SpaceX launches things all the time; I feel Euclid is the impressive bit here.

You are right.

But it's also weird that rocket launches themselves into orbit become so common they are almost not news.

I also start to wonder if anyone calculated or cared what the environment impact might to go from a few launches per year to a hundred or hundreds per year.

I mean it's Florida and they are planning to pave radioactive road material so not exactly concerned about the future so feds have to be the grownups.

Regardless of the environmental impact, rocket launches are the most important thing humanity should be doing

> give more credit to SpaceX rather than the Euclid team

Credit for what? For launching or for doing the dark matter & energy research?

While I think is appropriately and accurately attributed, I just don’t think it is relevant to the scientific story what rocket launched the apparatus. But I don’t know that space.com is the paragon of scientific reporting either.

The Euclid team didn’t launch it. The article is about the launch. It mentions the crowds applauding on the ground at the launch, etc.

If you don’t want to hear about spacex don’t read the articles mentioning the launches and wait for the ones about the satellite coming online.

I hate when I make the noob mistake of getting the timezone wrong and showing up an hour late like what I did today

I came across this the other day, it's pretty elegant and basically solves the problem. Comes in handy when you have eg a call with people in >2 timezones.

https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/converter.html

I can also recommend https://www.worldtimebuddy.com/

It's surprising how much ads all these tools show though.

yeah, sorry, i won't be visiting some website just to do timezone conversions. i'll just double check my work next time. to me, that's like the people that need to use GPS navigation to go to the same location they've been to more than once.

Well, navigation also shows you traffic information which is useful to choose the best path and to know at what time you will arrive.

you can see the traffic with a quick glance at the map app before leaving, but that's a pretty weak excuse anyways. you and i both know that there are people that need those turn by turn directions for reasons.

It feels like you have a bit of superiority complex against people who use GPS. What a weird thing to feel smart about.

Maybe OP doesn't travel a lot. Or is a taxi driver :)

Actually, I grew up in a time where we learned how to read and use maps (think Boy Scouts without being in the scouts). It’s a skill like anything else that takes practice. Using GPS nav is not practice. I’ll use the map app to look at the route, pick out familiar references, then uses those as waypoints. “Three blocks past majorStreetName, turn right” type of things.

So you "learned how to read and use maps", and that's a reason to not use GPS, but you won't visit a time zone website despite not having learned to do time zone conversions? I could see how the former is justified rationally but the latter doesn't seem to be.

Like you’ve never forgot to carry the one or put the decimal in the wrong place. Where you come off with that rationale is beyond me

yeah, sorry, i won't be visiting some website just to do timezone conversions.

I'm surprised to find that units doesn't handle this.

I wonder if there's another CLI tool that does.

/usr/bin/date converts using the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tz_database, though it's clunky.

I use https://time.is (Choose any location.)

Does other conversions and stuff, but much more elegant and simpler than your link.

Also good for setting your clock

Yep I use this for setting my mechanical watch every morning, great website apart from the clock text is relative to window width, so I can't zoom out if the window is too short, I literally have to resize the window width to see the time.

That's an interesting morning routine. Why do you do so (do you work in 'measurement' industry?)?

Mechanical clocks (like all clocks . . .) drift.

For two centuries mechanical clocks and watches have been regularly wound and reset.

Ports traditionally had a noon day canon and ball drop down a pole (like a flag pole) for ships in the harbour to set their onboard clocks to (for navigational use in determining Longitude).

Watches frequently have bimetallic strips (two sided) with metals that each expand with a differing coefficient to counter effect for rate of 'tick' with respect to tempreture.

Ships at sea required triplets of clocks with mechanisms that countered for pitch and roll accumulation.

You might enjoy:

https://ciechanow.ski/mechanical-watch/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longitude_(book)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horology

I think for me it's just part of the fun of owning a mechanical watch. Yesterday I got to increment the date from 31 to 1! But also it's useful having accurate time on my wrist and its drifts a few seconds every day (like any mechanical watch).

There's also https://www.whattimeisitrightnow.com/ if you like a longer and harder to remember URL.

time.is is clearly simpler in display on the splash page.

timeanddate.com has a lot of depth to it, it's been about for many years and has a back catalog of odd edge cases and pages of good technical explaination.

Its appearence can be customised.

What did catch my eye was I believe time.is may have read my timeanddate.com config cookies and displayed times for my custom locations ...

Which is interesting (and I'll have to circle back and check).

The default alternatives are LA, New York, London, Paris, Kyiv, Beijing, and Tokyo.

Cheers for that, your comment reminded me to check.

They're regional defaults - I'm getting Adelaide and Sydney thrown in as I'm in Australia .. and a few Asian cities also, along with London etc.

It's close but not quite my Timeanddate customs - I specifically use Toronto for the TSX time.

I guess they're not looking for competitors cookies after all :).

It’s also not possible for them to read the cookies of other domains without those domains setting cookie access control that explicitly allows it.

That's something I 'knew' in theory .. but as I'm back end numerical geophysics coder that avoids web UI as much as possible I frequently lag on the latest sneaky end runs in practice.

Nice to know that this is still the case - but always worth checking.

Yeah, the security of the web depends on it so it’s unlikely to ever change.

Your session tokens that give you access to a website after you’ve logged in are stored in those cookies. If another site could read them, they could use them to access your email, etc.

Why no UTC? I guess London may be the same, though I’m unsure about DST?

The launch wasn’t listed in UTC but in its local timezone? That is odd.

I just Google like "7pm EST" and it returns it in my local time.

I empathise. My parents and I did that once.

Before all the clocks were self-updating, we missed the change to summer time, which happened to be the day we'd arranged to meet sister and grandmother at a restaurant for Easter lunch…

Windows clock can show up to 3 timezones (system + two). I set one to whatever event I want to track, that way I'm sure I don't mess it up due to summer/winter time and whatnot.

Did I miss something in this article about time zones?

I missed the launch because when I woke up, I read the launch time quickly before being caffeinated, and did not do the math correctly. So when I sat down to watch, I realized it was an hour earlier. Nothing about the TFA, just sharing my misfortune

I quite like Next Spaceflight

https://apps.apple.com/au/app/next-spaceflight/id1448055760

Although it shows launch times in GMT, notifications are in relative time.

What about Euclid makes it more suitable for its task of mapping other galaxies than James Webb?

JW observes single stars and similar objects, while this one is meant to take a wider view, aiming a big picture of the mass distribution in the universe. In the article it is mentioned that it is expected to map around a third of the sky in six years.

Wish there were opportunities for non-European & non-American people to work in these inspiring and endeavoring organizations

India has ISRO

Japan has JAXA

The UAE have a space agency that even has a Mars mission running currently.

Same for China.

There's more I'm forgetting, but space stuff is not limited to Europe and the US.

Very true, although I assume that most or all of those listed have their own form of ITAR. Space (mostly defense) is inherently siloed to country borders.

Isn't that most large capital intensive efforts?

Also to be fair a lot of US defense and aero contractors have manufacturing partnerships around the world.

> Isn't that most large capital intensive efforts?

No.

For example in university i was part of a satellite design competition. We couldn’t let Chinese nationals on the team or we’d be breaking the law. There was a list of approved countries a team member could have citizenship from, if not we’d be guilty of violating export controls.

I wonder, could an American join a satellite design competition team in a Chinese school?

If an American did the US State Department might want a word or two with them.

Satellites are considered munitions… working on a foreign power’s weapons programs is… discouraged.

I can't speak for the other nations, but Space technology in Canada is controlled under the Controlled Goods Program (CGP). A CGP clearance is obtainable as a Permanent Resident. No citizenship required. Various Canadian companies are suppliers/partners for space projects in the US. For example the Artemis project is using the Canadian company MDA as a key supplier (to manufacture space robotic systems, including a newer version of the robotic arm currently on the ISS). SpaceX also has a number of Canadian suppliers, although their involvement is not advertised very much.

The US is the same. You don't need to be a citizen to work an ITAR controlled job. A green card will suffice.

I'm part of the rest of the 4 billion. The ones you mentioned only take their own citizens (probably except UAE).

> except UAE

I got bad news for you. Their spacecraft was built by University of Colorado at Boulder.

There's plenty of contractors working on space technology that would hire someone without citizenship, I'm sure.

Strictly speaking for American contractors, I'm 99% sure that is not true. If you have any contract with the government for space stuff, all of your workers have to be citizens. I'm not even sure they'd let a permanent resident work there because of ITAR.

Permanent residents are considered US persons under ITAR, so provided the company's activities are limited to civilian space projects it isn't an issue. However, if the company has defense contracts and requires employees to obtain a security clearance, that requires citizenship.

Lol. Not even. What about Musk. He is not born in US

Elon supposedly got full U.S. citizenship after he made connections with the CIA (Michael D. Griffin) although the details aren't really known.

He became a citizen by naturalization in 2002 (the same year he launched SpaceX), not some shadowy conspiracy.

Those aren't mutually exclusive.

He became a citizen

I think that the UN had a program for facilitating smaller nations access to space. Currently, I'm finding only the outer space office there though.

Alternatively, many of the private space companies don't have citizenship requirements.

>Alternatively, many of the private space companies don't have citizenship requirements.

In America at least private companies are equally covered by ITAR, so they do have citizenship/greencard requirements (or need a variance that is nearly never granted in practice). SpaceX can't just hire international talent as it wishes. I assume there may be similar rules in some other countries, though certainly not all. But it's not merely a matter of private vs public fwiw.

There are? Japan (JAXA), India (ISRO), China (CNSA) and Russia (Roscosmos) all do science missions.

Not generally known, I think, but Canada is technically part of ESA. Not a full member, a 'Cooperating State', but there are some benefits. Wiki sez "Canadian firms can bid for and receive contracts to work on (ESA) programmes."

Yeah, and a lot of people also think it's a "EU only" club, but other countries like Norway, Switzerland, and the UK are also members.

ESA isn't even an EU Institution, the EU has its own space agency called EUSPA[1]

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_Agency_for_the_...

EUSPA isn't really a space agency. As the article says, EUSPA gets ESA to do the technical work.

Your odds probably wouldn't be much better if you were an American.

Not really true. The industry has grown dramatically in the last 10 years and is hiring aggressively. There are budgetary ups and downs (both for privately funded stuff and NASA), but overall, if you are an American and are passionate about getting involved in the space industry, there are countless opportunities to do so.

Very true. Many space startups and NASA contractors always hiring. But aerospace famously pays peanuts (I think too many fanboys who just hear “space” and sign on dotted line)

If people want more technical details: http://amsdottorato.unibo.it/8437/7/fornari_federico_tesi.pd...

Does anyone have any information about the comms package of the Euclid. Getting that amount of data from L1 to Earth must be an interesting challenge.

    For Euclid, the service module provides X and K band communications, with a K band science data rate of ~55 Mbit/s during the daily telecommanding and communications period of 4 hours.

    To store the large data volume that will be accumulated during observations, Euclid will have a mass memory of at least 2.6 Tbit.

https://sci.esa.int/web/euclid/-/service-module

You can get more information by contacting the service module team.

    Thales Alenia Space in Spain has delivered the communications module for the Euclid satellite to Thales Alenia Space’s Turin plant, where it will be integrated with the service module.

https://www.thalesgroup.com/en/worldwide/space/press-release...

no dark universe to map.

Do we need an article about the trucking company that brought the telescope to the launch pad as well? Surely all freight carriers are due recognition?

This headline makes it sounds like SpaceX is more that a freight carrier here, undoubtedly for clicks.

Being a freight carrier to space is indeed very cool, and exciting, but they didn’t make the telescope.

If does have some relevance:

> Incidentally, Euclid was not supposed to launch aboard SpaceX at all. As late as February 2022, the mission was manifested upon an Arianespace Soyuz (provided by Russia) for a March 2023 launch in French Guiana. Russia's unsanctioned invasion of Ukraine forced a stop to most such space collaborations aside from the International Space Station, pushing Euclid's team to look for another ride to space.

Why write about launches? We could wait until it starts gathering data because that’s what really matters, right?

Given that it’s a rocket launch, crediting the company that did the launch makes some sense.

Why not write about launches? It is not every day ESA launches a telescope to a Lagrange point after all.

Why write about when it starts collecting data? We could wait until actual worldview changing research results surface because that’s what really matters.

The fact of the matter is worldview changing results will likely not ever surface, just as they didn’t from JWST. So instead press departments pretend all the steps along the way are important because it helps improve public sentiment for the financing of these “moonshots” (which hardly even deserve the name, we haven’t accomplished anything remotely like placing a man on the moon in decades).

> The fact of the matter is worldview changing results will likely not ever surface, just as they didn’t from JWST.

What do you count as worldview changing result? Who promised you that the JWST will deliver such things?

You are also quite quick to write off a mission with a 20 year design lifespan.

The worldview changing result of Hubble was HUDF and the revelation that it doesn’t matter how deep you look it’s all the same damn spirals and shit.

I wouldn’t know what JWST’s result would be, if I knew it a priori it wouldn’t be much of a result would it? But I don’t expect much. Happy to be pleasantly surprised.

> The worldview changing result of Hubble was HUDF and the revelation that it doesn’t matter how deep you look it’s all the same damn spirals and shit.

Interesting. What was your world view before this and how did it changed? Did you for example believed earlier that only the galaxies we have mapped so far do exist?

> if I knew it a priori it wouldn’t be much of a result would it?

Yet you are already certain it “did not materialise”. What was the latency between the photons of HUDF hitting Hubble’s mirror and your worldview being changed?

I had hoped that looking closer might revel something different than what we already saw. It didn’t.

Certainly nothing has materialized yet, which is all I claimed. Do you feel anything of significance has come from the project?

Something has materialised, those "damn spirals and shit" were around way earlier than thought. Maybe it is damn spirals and shit all the way down into the primordial quark soup? Need a bigger telescope to find out but that is just the way these things work. I say go for that bigger telescope, more of this type of research and "moonshots" and all. This is the final frontier we're talking about, the place where dreams go. They may go to die but we'll only find out if we try so try we should. Without this type of research all that is left is to take a microscope to this pale blue dot we live on which would be fine were it not for the fact that the microscope would most likely be taken over by the same prophets of doom who cry woe over all the human race does. Let us look outward as well as inward to gain some perspective, let the doom-criers realise that the universe is big and dark and full of places to park.

> those "damn spirals and shit" were around way earlier than thought

You’re telling me someone with exposure to HUDF saw more spirals and shit longer ago via JWST and said “wow that’s unexpected, who could have guessed spirals and shit would go further back”? And you believed them? If so, I have a bridge to sell you…

Either they have no pattern recognition/projection capability, or (more likely) they’re pretending to express shock at the exact result they expected because it results in more media attention and funding.

Consider, what gets more media attention: “JWST finds more of the exact same stuff Hubble already found everywhere, but this time at the slightly lower frequency for which it is tuned” or “Breaking News! Scientists working on the JWST say they have found signs of early galaxies that have been around for far longer than anyone ever imaged before!”? If you look closely, the two messages are the exact same. But to the media/layperson something interesting is happening in the second one.

> This headline makes it sounds like SpaceX is more that a freight carrier here, undoubtedly for clicks.

How many commercial freight carriers do you think are options right now?

I would love for rocket launches to be as mundane as hiring a trucker... but they aren't.

This is an important milestone for a science project that has been 20 years in the making and might yield a few nobel prices. I think it's worthy enough for HN.

Here ya go:

https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Euclid...

Here's the lead scientist who originated the idea:

https://researchportal.port.ac.uk/en/persons/adam-amara

You're just salty because it's related to Elon Muskuito. That's okay, I am too.

Wow, some people just can't get over their musk hate.

It actually is remarkable that SpaceX is doing it, because this would almost certainly be done by a European launch vehicle, except that Ariane 5 is sold out, Vega-C has had a launch failure and is in stand-down due to investigation of the failure, and Soyuz has been problematic ever since the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. (Russia has pulled personnel, plus there are sanctions.)

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