The underside of the shield is partially covered with solar panels and always faces the Sun, generating electricity to operate the spacecraft and its instruments.
#APOLLO GAIA PROJECT GENERATOR#
This acts as both a sunshade to permanently shade the telescopes and allow their temperatures to drop to below –100☌, and as a power generator for the spacecraft. Gaia launched on a Soyuz-STB/Fregat-MT launch vehicle from the European Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana.Īfter launch, Gaia unfolded a ‘skirt’ just over 10 m in diameter. The vast catalogue of celestial objects created from Gaia’s scientific haul is not only benefiting studies of our own Solar System and Galaxy, but also the fundamental physics that underpins our entire Universe. Even stars near the Galactic centre, some 30 000 light-years away, will have their distances measured to within an accuracy of 20%. This is allowing the nearest stars to have their distances measured to the extraordinary accuracy of 0.001%. This is comparable to measuring the diameter of a human hair at a distance of 1000 km. Gaia is achieving its goals by repeatedly measuring the positions of all objects down to magnitude 20 (about 400 000 times fainter than can be seen with the naked eye).įor all objects brighter than magnitude 15 (4000 times fainter than the naked eye limit), Gaia is measuring their positions to an accuracy of 24 microarcseconds. By watching for the large-scale motion of stars in our Galaxy, it is also probing the distribution of dark matter, the invisible substance thought to hold our Galaxy together.
This huge stellar census is providing the data needed to tackle an enormous range of important open questions relating to the origin, structure and evolutionary history of our Galaxy.įor example, Gaia is identifying which stars are relics from smaller galaxies long ago ‘swallowed’ by the Milky Way. Gaia is creating an extraordinarily precise three-dimensional map of nearly two billion objects throughout our Galaxy and beyond, mapping their motions, luminosity, temperature and composition. What's special? The density of stars from Gaia’s Early Data Release 3
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