Later, a new satellite that will study the universe's 10 billion years of evolution is scheduled to launch.
Adam Amara, a Hampshire professor, is the creator of the $1 billion Euclid project, which was spurred on by his desire to learn more about the dark side of the universe.
After 18 years of preparation by Prof. Amara, it is being launched in Florida by Elon Musk's Space X company.
You can watch the launch at 16:12 BST on YouTube or the European Space Agency (ESA) website.
There are currently only images of very small areas of the sky, according to the professor who also serves as the Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation's director at the University of Portsmouth.
Instead, Euclid will take high-resolution pictures that will encompass more than a third of the extragalactic sky outside the Milky Way.
It will also conduct near-infrared spectroscopy of the same sky's hundreds of millions of galaxies and stars.
The quality of the images will be "at least four times sharper than that achieved by ground-based sky surveys," according to the ESA, which is funding the project.
Astronomers could learn more about dark matter and dark energy thanks to this.
Almost nothing is known about these phenomena, despite the fact that they seem to govern the universe's shape and expansion.
Experiments show that the cosmic contents consist of:.
- 5 % approximately. ordinary matter. – the building blocks of which we are all composed, the atoms.
- approximately 27%. deep space. - unfathomable and unobserved to this point.
- roughly 68 percent. eerie energy. – the enigmatic element speeding up the expansion of the universe.
It is estimated that the universe is 13 and a half billion years old.
In all, 2,600 individuals from all over the world have contributed to the project over the past 18 years.
Prof. Amara responded to a question about how he would feel when the infamous countdown started on BBC Radio Solent: "I don't know.
"This is unlike anything I've ever experienced. It is new. It's unsettling. rejoicing, crying if it goes up, and crying if it explodes. Many tears will be shed. " .
