The One-Billion Pixel Camera Mapping the Galaxy
Inside Gaia's billion-pixel camera
ESA's Gaia mission will produce an unprecedented 3D map of our Galaxy by mapping, with exquisite precision, the position and motion of a billion stars. The key to this is the billion-pixel camera at the heart of its dual telescope. This animation illustrates how the camera works.
Gaia launch replay highlights
ESA's Gaia mission blasted off on 19 December 2013 on a Soyuz rocket from Europe's Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana, on its exciting mission to study a billion suns.
Gaia is destined to create the most accurate map yet of the Milky Way. By making accurate measurements of the positions and motions of 1% of the total population of roughly 100 billion stars, it will answer questions about the origin and evolution of our home Galaxy.
The Soyuz launcher, operated by Arianespace, lifted off at 09:12 GMT (10:12 CET). About ten minutes later, after separation of the first three stages, the Fregat upper stage ignited, delivering Gaia into a temporary parking orbit at an altitude of 175 km.
Gaia is now en route towards an orbit around a gravitationally-stable virtual point in space called L2, some 1.5 million kilometres beyond Earth as seen from the Sun.
This video includes highlights of the launch webcast including lift-off from Kourou, the Soyuz mission, separation of Gaia and the successful entry into orbit.
Credit:ESA / CNEA / Arianespace
Gaia's mission: solving the celestial puzzle
A space mission to create the largest, most-accurate, map of the Milky Way in three dimensions will revolutionise our understanding of the galaxy and the universe beyond.
On 19th December 2013, a rocket blasted into the sky from a launch site in French Guiana and travelled 1.5 million km to reach its destination in orbit around the Sun. The spacecraft is called Gaia. Its mission, funded by the European Space Agency and involving scientists from across Europe, is to make the largest, most precise, three-dimensional map of the Milky Way ever attempted.
It will be a census of a billion stars spread across our galaxy. The results, says Professor Gerry Gilmore from Cambridge's Institute of Astronomy and the Principal Investigator for UK involvement in the mission, "will revolutionise our understanding of the cosmos as never before."
A global space astrometry mission, Gaia will make the largest, most precise three-dimensional map of our Galaxy by surveying more than a thousand million stars.
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