ESA’s Euclid satellite departs from Thales Alenia Space’s plant in Cannes in a carefully monitored container, carried by an exceptional convoy truck. The satellite headed over to the port of Savona, Italy, then boarded a ship that is taking it to the port near its launch site in Cape Canaveral, Florida.

The ship is expected to reach its destination at the beginning of May, getting ready for launch no earlier than this July on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Florida, USA.

Euclid will travel 1.5 million km from Earth, in the opposite direction to the Sun, to the Lagrange point L2. From there, ESA's Euclid mission will begin the detective work of exploring the dark Universe.

Euclid will create the largest, most accurate 3D map of the Universe ever. It will observe billions of galaxies out to 10 billion light-years, across more than a third of the sky.

With this map, Euclid will reveal how the Universe has expanded and how large-scale structure has evolved over cosmic history. And from this, we can learn more about the role of gravity and the nature of dark energy and dark matter.