UK Space Agency fund to unlock secrets of the Sun

The missions − Euclid, PLATO and Solar Orbiter − are part of ESA’s Cosmic Vision programme and have been selected from more than 50 original ideas to go forward for detailed technical and cost assessments. In June 2011, ESA will decide which two of the three missions to build and launch between 2017 and 2020.

The UK Space Agency helps fund the European Space Agency’s series of space-science missions, which include Mars Express and the Herschel space telescope, through its subscription to the ESA club.

The Euclid mission would address key questions relevant to fundamental physics and cosmology, namely the nature of the mysterious dark energy and dark matter. Current theory suggests that these substances dominate the ordinary matter of stars and planets. In particular, dark energy has been proposed to explain the observation made by the Hubble Space telescope that, contrary to expectations, the expansion of the Universe seems to be faster now than it was billions of years ago.