Sputnik comes live as the European Space Agency (ESA) launches its Euclid spacecraft, carried by a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, on Saturday, 1 July.
The mission is in partnership with NASA, which provided critical hardware for the craft’s instruments, as well as funding and data processing.
The mission will use a whole panoply of instruments to study the properties of dark matter and dark energy, as well as their interaction with normal matter.
The scientific community expects to be able to use this valuable information to confront what the project manager of Euclid, Giuseppe Racca, describes as a "cosmic embarrassment": the fact that a staggering 95 percent of the universe remains shrouded in mystery to mankind. Approximately 70 percent of the universe is believed to consist of dark energy, a force responsible for the accelerated expansion of the universe.
Dark matter - which is believed to make up approximately 80 percent of the universe's mass - is estimated to account for 25 percent of it and is thought to play a crucial role in maintaining the cohesion of the universe.
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