Ice layers, about as wide as a single DNA strand, have accumulated on Euclid's mirrors. Although small, the ice appears to have caused"a small but progressive decrease" in the amount of starlight the telescope is capturing, the agency said in a statement on March 19 . The telescope continues its science observations for now while scientists begin heating low-risk optical parts of the spacecraft to begin a de-icing process.
The issue first came to light when the mission team noticed a gradual decrease in starlight measured with one of Euclid's two science instruments, called the visible instrument . To help catalog 1.5 billion galaxies and their stellar populations, VIS collects visible light from stars similar to how a smartphone camera operates, only with 100 times as many pixels. Its resolution is thus equivalent to a 4K screen.
"Some stars in the universe vary in their luminosity, but the majority are stable for many millions of years," Mischa Schirmer, a Euclid scientist who is leading the de-icing campaign, said in the statement."So, when our instruments detected a faint, gradual decline in photons coming in, we knew it wasn't them — it was us."
The easiest solution would be to heat the entire spacecraft, but doing so would also warm up the telescope's mechanical structure, whose components would expand but not necessarily return to their original states even after a week, the mission scientists say. That would limit Euclid's vision and, in turn, impact the quality of data it gathers. The telescope is influenced by even the tiniest of temperature changes.
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