Prof. Adam Amara was 25 years old when he decided to work on the satellite project
A professor has described what a new satellite will look like after 10 billion years of evolution of the universe.
The £1 billion Euclid project is the brainchild of Hampshire professor Adam Amara and was inspired by his desire to unlock the secrets of the dark universe.
Professor Amara said that if next month’s launch is successful, it will give astronomers access to “unique data”.
It was launched in Florida by Elon Musk’s company Space X after 18 years of preparatory work by Prof. Amara.
Prof Amara, who is director of the Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation at the University of Portsmouth, explained that so far only images of very small areas of the sky were available.
Instead, Euclid will take high-resolution images that will cover more than a third of the extragalactic sky outside the Milky Way.
It will also perform near-infrared spectroscopy of hundreds of millions of galaxies and stars across the same sky.
According to European Space Agency (ESA), which is funding the project, the image quality will be “at least four times sharper than that achieved by ground-based sky surveys”.
This will allow astronomers to learn more about the nature of dark matter and dark energy.
These phenomena appear to control the shape and expansion of the universe, but virtually nothing is known about them.
Composition of the Universe
Experiments show that cosmic content includes:
- approximately 5% normal matter – atoms, the stuff we are all made of
- about 27% dark matter – hitherto unseen directly and beyond description
- about 68% dark energy – the mysterious component accelerating cosmic expansion
The universe is estimated to be 13.8 billion years old.
Prof Amara admitted the whole project was risky, but said if all went well, the material provided by Euclid would provide data never before available.
He explained that scientific satellites cannot be insured.
“This is a one-off. You make it work. No one insured him. You can’t rebuild it,” he said.
“These things really fail. It can get bad, but you have to try.”
Dark matter has been described as the scaffolding on which the visible structure of the universe is hung
A total of 2,600 people from around the world have worked on the project over the past 18 years.
It was in 2005 when Prof. Amara, then 25, turned down a job at Princeton University to work on his satellite idea in a lab in France.
“When you turn down a prestigious position … to work on an idea that probably won’t succeed, they think you’re crazy,” he said.
“Serious people would say it’s career suicide, why would you do it?”
But he decided to persevere.
Asked how he would feel when the famous countdown begins, he told BBC Radio Solent: “I don’t know.
“I have never experienced anything like this. It’s new. I feel terrible. Celebrate, cry if it goes up, cry if it blows up. There will be many tears.’