among other aspects. While telescopes like Hubble and JWST have captured our imaginations with their deep, high-resolution views all across the Universe, they also face a tremendous limitation: they have narrow, small-angle fields of view, and can only see a tiny fraction of the sky at once.
But other observatories — although they’re usually smaller, lower in resolution, and cover narrower sets of wavelength ranges — have the advantage of being able to image large areas of the sky all at once. While NASA’s upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope and the NSF’s Vera Rubin observatory will excel in those regards, the ESA’s Euclid mission has gotten there first: having launched in July of 2023 and now, in November, begins its 6+ year mission to map out as much of the Universe as possible. It’s a remarkable and ambitious project, and not only are its science operations already underway, but it’s going to revolutionize what we know about the Universe. Here’s how.