SpaceX rocket launches Euclid space telescope to map the 'dark universe'

Yeah, and a lot of people also think it's a "EU only" club, but other countries like Norway, Switzerland, and the UK are also members.

You are right.

But it's also weird that rocket launches themselves into orbit become so common they are almost not news.

I also start to wonder if anyone calculated or cared what the environment impact might to go from a few launches per year to a hundred or hundreds per year.

I mean it's Florida and they are planning to pave radioactive road material so not exactly concerned about the future so feds have to be the grownups.

Annoying article. Lots of words without saying what precisely it's going to do and how it's better than previous efforts. Much more information (23 thousand words!) is on the ESA website here: https://www.eoportal.org/satellite-missions/euclid

Euclid is a deep sky survey space telescope. Like many space telescopes, it's designed to run cold (-140C) to extend viewing into infrared bands ground telescopes can't access. It's like a mini-Webb, orbiting next to it out at L2, but with one twenty fifth of the mirror area, and ten thousand pounds less mass. (Of course, it was also $9 billion cheaper...) Being a sky survey instrument, it has a wider field of view than Webb, half a square degree versus 0.0025 sq deg.

It's something of a follow-on to ESA's Gaia astrometry space telescope, which surveyed the entire sky out to visual magnitude 20 and in 320–1000 nm light, while Euclid will specifically examine the 15,000 square degrees of the sky the Milky Way doesn't cover, out to magnitude 24.5 and in 550-2000 nm light. Both dimmer and more redshifted. (Fun trivia: both Gaia and Euclid are made entirely out of silicon carbide, including the optical bench and mirrors, which has become a ESA specialty.)

For another comparison, the first Sloan sky survey (using a 2.5m ground based telescope much bigger than Euclid) took 5 years to image 8,000 square degrees down to magnitude 22.2 and only out to 893 nm. Again, Euclid can see objects dimmer and more redshifted.

Unfortunately for ESA's press office, Euclid will not be producing a lot of pretty photos. It's a comparatively low resolution telescope designed specifically to look outside our galaxy (so no nebula photos) that only has three fairly broadband color filters on just one of the two instruments. (So none of the spectacular detail that some of Webb's narrowband filters can bring out) If it still has propellant after the first 6 year mission finishes then they might turn it around and image the Pillars of Creation but for the near future its fate is to transmit terabytes of photos of dim smudges for astronomers to do statistical analysis on.

I think for me it's just part of the fun of owning a mechanical watch. Yesterday I got to increment the date from 31 to 1! But also it's useful having accurate time on my wrist and its drifts a few seconds every day (like any mechanical watch).

So you "learned how to read and use maps", and that's a reason to not use GPS, but you won't visit a time zone website despite not having learned to do time zone conversions? I could see how the former is justified rationally but the latter doesn't seem to be.