Gaia launch delayed over dicey components
Gaia mapping the stars of the Milky Way (Photo: ESA/ATG medialab; background image: ESO/S. Brunier)
Image Gallery (6 images)
The Gaia mission to map a billion stars in the Milky Way has been
delayed for about two months by the European Space Agency (ESA). X-band
transponders used in other satellites have begun to fail, so the ESA has
decided to replace those modules prior to launching. The likely
blastoff date will be in late December of this year.
The
Gaia mission
is intended to map the position and velocity of a billion stars in the
Milky Way to support ongoing studies on galactic dynamics. The main
instrument for this mapping is a gigapixel camera, by far the most
complex ever launched into space. The Gaia satellite will orbit near the
L2 point positioned about 1.5 million kilometers behind Earth.
Gaia will produce a three-dimensional map of our galaxy. The map will
be missing most of the Milky Way's stars (only including one billion of
a total of some 400 billion), but this will cover our galactic region
in considerable detail, and will provide much needed information about
more distant and dust-obscured regions. The positions will be solid to
about 24 microarcseconds, which is the width of a human hair at a
distance of 1,000 km (621 mi).
As a "free" side result, Gaia is expected to find hundreds of
thousands of asteroids and comets in the solar system, perhaps 7,000
exoplanets, 20,000 supernovae, and hundreds of thousands of quasars.
Clearly, the analysis of Gaia's petabyte (one million gigabytes) of data
will continue long after its five-year mission is complete.
Source:
ESA
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