Europe's space telescope launches to target universe's dark mysteries

Europe's Euclid space telescope blasted off Saturday on the first-ever mission aiming to shed light on two of the universe's greatest mysteries: dark energy and dark matter.

The telescope successfully took off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, at 11:12 am local time on a Falcon 9 rocket from SpaceX. After a month-long journey through space, Euclid will join its fellow space telescope James Webb at a stable hovering spot around 1.5 million kilometers from Earth called the second Lagrange Point.

From there, Euclid will chart the largest-ever map of the universe, encompassing up to two billion galaxies across more than a third of the sky. By capturing light that has taken 10 billion years to reach Earth's vicinity, the map will also offer a new view of the 13.8-billion-year-old universe's history.