Billion Star Sky Surveyor Launches

Billion Star Sky Surveyor Launches

Europe’s Gaia Space Telescope promises to create the most accurate map of the Milky Way galaxy ever attempted. 
Credit: ESA/ATG medialab; background: ESO/S. Brunier

Europe’s new Milky Way Galaxy mapping-mission, called Gaia, is about to embark on a space mission that should create the most detailed three-dimensional star chart of the nearest billion stars. Each and every target star will have its position, distance, movement, and changes in brightness followed at least 70 times over a five year period. (See also ”Mystery Deepens Over Where Sun Was Born“.)

The two-ton space telescope,  launched on Thursday on a Russian Soyuz rocket, headed into orbit from the European Space Agency’s spaceport in French Guiana.

Light from the cosmos will focus onto Gaia’s eye, a single digital camera equipped with a billion-pixel CCD chip-set, the largest and most sensitive light-detector ever flown in space.

With 100 individual mini-detectors working in concert, star positions will be measured with stunning precision, down to 10 micro arc-seconds of accuracy. “This is an astonishing step up in accuracy. To give an example, Gaia will measure the difference in position of one side of a human hair compared to the other side of it—in Paris, as viewed from London,” said mission scientist Mark Cropper, from the Mullard Space Science Laboratory in a statement.