Euclid space mission sends first colour images to Earth

Images from Euclid have been beamed back to Earth. Keystone / Ronald Wittek

The Euclid Space Telescope has sent the first color images from the cosmos to Earth. 

They show the great potential of the mission, in which Swiss institutions are also involved, as the European Space Agency (ESA) announced on Tuesday.

“It’s incredibly exciting to see the first pictures,” said Julian Adamek from the University of Zurich (UZH) to the Keystone-SDA news agency. The researcher has been working on the Euclid mission for over ten years. “You see for the first time what the instruments can do.”

Never before has a telescope been able to produce such sharp astronomical images over such a large area of ​​the sky, the ESA said.

With the telescope, ESA wants to create the most comprehensive 3D map of the universe to date and research its evolution over the last ten billion years. The probe was launched into space in July.

From Switzerland, in addition to UZH, the University of Applied Sciences Northwestern Switzerland, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne and the University of Geneva are involved in Euclid.

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