Kennedy Space Center, United States: The rocket carrying the European Space Agency's Euclid telescope took off from Florida on Saturday morning, a live video of the launch showed, the first step in a mission to study dark matter.

After taking off aboard a Falcon 9 SpaceX rocket around 11:12 am (1512 GMT), the two-ton telescope will eventually be positioned some 932,000 miles (1.5 million kilometers) from the Earth to observe both dark matter and dark energy -- two little-understood forces key to the universe's functions.

The former is responsible for holding galaxies together, the latter for the expansion of the universe, with both combined thought to make up 95 percent of the universe.