8, 2014, Gaia entered its operational orbit around the Sun-Earth L2 Lagrange point, about 932,000 miles (1.5 million kilometers) from Earth, when its engine fired to boost the spacecraft into a 163,000 × 439,000-mile (263,000 × 707,000-kilometer) halo orbit with a period of 180 days.Īfter four months of calibration, alignment and focusing of its telescopes, Gaia began its five-year mission July 25, 2014. Launched by a Russian Soyuz rocket, the Fregat upper stage pushed Gaia into a 109 × 109-mile (175 × 175-kilometer) Earth orbit, and then fired again for a long burn into a 214 × 598,200-mile (344 × 962,690-kilometer) orbit at a 15-degree inclination. More specifically, Gaia provides high-quality measurements to produce a stereoscopic and kinematic census of about 1 billion stars in our galaxy (about 1% of the total) and the Local Group, the group of galaxies that includes the Milky Way. Gaia is a European space observatory whose goal is to chart a three-dimensional map of the Milky Way galaxy in order to reveal the composition, formation and evolution of the galaxy. Credits: ESA/Gaia/DPAC Map: CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO The map shows the total brightness and color of stars observed by the ESA satellite in each portion of the sky between July 2014 and May 2016. Gaia's all-sky view of our Milky Way Galaxy and neighboring galaxies, based on measurements of nearly 1.7 billion stars. Sep 14, 2016: ESA released its first dataset from GaiaĪpr 25, 2018: ESA released a second dataset from Gaia Gaia is attempting to create the largest, most-precise 3-D map of our galaxy, the Milky Way.Each of the 1 billion stars that Gaia studies will be observed an average of 70 times over five years to create a record of the brightness and the position of each star over time.Gaia will detect and very accurately measure the motion of each star in its orbit around the center of the galaxy.Its goal is to create the largest, most precise three-dimensional map of the Milky Way by surveying about 1% of the galaxy's 100 billion stars. Gaia, the Global Astrometric Interferometer for Astrophysics, is a European Space Agency astronomical observatory mission.
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