Launched aboard a Falcon 9 from Cape Canaveral on 1 July, Europe's Euclid satellite reached without trouble, after a month, its operational orbit, the Lagrange 2 point, which is located at 1.5 million kilometres from Earth. The L2 zone enables satellites to observe the distant cosmic web without being disturbed by the presence of the Sun, Earth or Moon.

According to the scientific community, the first test images delivered by ESA’s dark universe explorer are very promising. So, everything is going perfectly well.

SPACEBEL is particularly proud of this success: on behalf of Thales Alenia Space Italy, Euclid's prime contractor, we have developed the Euclid control and data management unit application software, which controls the spacecraft and all its sub-systems, including the payloads.

Once again, our state-of-the-art technology has clearly demonstrated its worth, with the particularity that, in this case, it is one of the most complex software systems produced by SPACEBEL to date, involving a team of some ten engineers since 2015. Present during the lift-off in the United States and at ESOC (Germany), our team was congratulated on its remarkable achievement.

Having arrived safely in port, Euclid can now embark on its ambitious mission: scanning up to 2 billion galaxies over the past 10 billion light years in order to produce a 3D map of the structure of the universe while unlocking the secrets of the nature of dark energy and the influence of dark matter, with the aim of gaining a better understanding of the origin of the universe, its evolution and the reason for its accelerated expansion.

Euclid operates alongside its famous neighbours, the American James Webb telescope and ESA's Gaia stellar observatory, which is mapping the Milky Way using also SPACEBEL expertise (find out more).

Watch the insightful video on Euclid released by NASA and find out more on the dark universe and the characteristics of this amazing Space telescope.