This artist impression shows Euclid leaving Earth and on its way to Sun-Earth Lagrange point L2. This equilibrium point of the Sun-Earth system is located 1.5 million kilometres from Earth in the opposite direction of the Sun. L2 orbits along with Earth around the Sun. During Euclid’s orbit at L2, Euclid’s sunshield always blocks the light from the Sun, Earth and Moon while pointing its telescope towards deep space, ensuring a high level of stability for its instruments.

ESA's Euclid mission is designed to explore the composition and evolution of the dark Universe. The space telescope will create a great map of the large-scale structure of the Universe across space and time by observing billions of galaxies out to 10 billion light-years, across more than a third of the sky. Euclid will explore how the Universe has expanded and how structure has formed over cosmic history, revealing more about the role of gravity and the nature of dark energy and dark matter.

Acknowledgement: Work performed by ATG under contract for ESA.