Western Australia is providing critical ground support tomorrow to the European Space Agency to uncover the dark side of the Universe.

"I’m incredibly proud and inspired tosee Australia involved in such a critical function of the launch and mission."

Australia's first astronaut candidate Katherine Bennell-Pegg

The Euclid space telescope launch on Space X’s Falcon-9 rocket at Cape Canaveral, in Florida, will be tracked by ESA from a location 70km north of Perth, underthe watchful eye of New Norcia ground station manager Suzy Jackson and her team.

ESA’s New Norcia ground station crew members are experienced with these high octane launches — often sitting in the hot seat tokeep track of ESA’s spacecraft as they leave the Earth’s orbit. By the time the spacecraft is within New Norcia’s horizon, it has gathered enough speed toshoot out of orbit into deep space.

Image: This telescope at New Norcia in WA will play a critical role in tracking the path of Euclid.

Euclid will map the Universe in 3D to shine light on the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy, which make up 95 per cent of the Universe.

The University of Western Australia’s Laureate Professor Simon Driver from the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) and head of the Astronomy from Space Node of the International Space Centre (ISC), leads a team that will take advantage of a special data collection period before the telescope goes into full-time survey mode.

His team, which includes Associate Professor Aaron Robotham, Dr Sabine Bellstedt and Dr Luke Davies, will receive the first data download from the telescope and look at how the galaxies have changed shape overtime, and study the clustering of these galaxies. This information will show important galaxy collisions are for creating the different types of galaxies we see today.

“Euclid will survey about a third of the sky and allow us to study the fine details of millions of galaxies at all distances. Up until now we have observations of nearby galaxies from the ground and very distant images from Hubble and James Webb Space Telescope,” Professor Driver said.

“Euclid will fill the gap in between, so we can track how things have changed — kind of like building up a fossil record from a core sample through Antarctic ice; here we’re using Euclid to take a really thick core sample through the Universe.”

Australia’s first astronaut candidate Katherine Bennell-Pegg, from the Australian Space Agency, will be part of a small expert team watching the launch from ESA’s European Space Operations Centre in Darmstadt, in Germany.

“I’m incredibly proud and inspired tosee Australia involved in such a critical function of the launch and mission,” Ms Bennell-Pegg said.

“Together with my astronaut colleagues in Germany, I’ll be watching out for that signal acquisition and subsequent handovers in the mission control room. Good luck to those in the hot seat in Perth! For all those Aussie kids out there dreaming of the stars, this is an example of how we can be involved in space-based telescope missions right here in Australia. There’s so much compelling work to do and much remains to be discovered.”