As Gaia slowly spins, it will create a billion-pixel video of the Milky Way, watching everything move, and deducing what is there, and where it is.
—Professor Gerry Gilmore
A powerful data centre being turned on yesterday (Thurs) at the Institute for Astronomy (IoA) will process the vast amount of imaging data sent back to Earth by a satellite which is due to be launched into space in August 2013. The Gaia satellite, whose heart is the largest digital camera ever built, will orbit the Sun at a distance of 1.5 km from Earth and will feed the data centre with a billion-pixel video of a billion stars, galaxies, quasars and solar system asteroids for five years after launch.
The installation of the data centre, funded by the UK Space Agency, coincides with the 50th Anniversary of the launch of the British satellite research programme, Ariel-1, which was devoted to studying the ionosphere – a part of the upper atmosphere.
The Gaia satellite, which has been hailed as the premier European astrophysics space mission of the decade, will deliver an extraordinarily precise census of the Milky Way in three dimensions.
“As Gaia slowly spins, it will create a billion-pixel video of the Milky Way, watching everything move, and deducing what is there, and where it is,” explained Professor Gerry Gilmore, from the IoA and the UK Principal Investigator for UK involvement in the mission. “On its five-year mission, Gaia will produce a vast amount of information – almost inconceivable in its scope.”
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Image: Gaia Deployable Sunshield Assembly Credit: European Space Agency
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge
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