The exhibition “One thousand million eyes for one thousand million stars”, organised by UB researchers, describes the Gaia mission

The satellite <i>Gaia</i> (Photo: E. Masana/Astrium).
The satellite Gaia (Photo: E. Masana/Astrium).
(02/07/2013)
 
Gaia, the satellite of the European Space Agency (ESA) that will map our Galaxy with an unparalleled precision, is ready to start its 5-year mission. About 400 European scientists and engineers, thirty of them from the University of Barcelona, have just finished the preparation process of the satellite. The launch, from the European Spaceport in Kourou (French Guiana), takes place on 25 October.

 

The satellite <i>Gaia</i> (Photo: E. Masana/Astrium).
The satellite Gaia (Photo: E. Masana/Astrium).
02/07/2013
 
Gaia, the satellite of the European Space Agency (ESA) that will map our Galaxy with an unparalleled precision, is ready to start its 5-year mission. About 400 European scientists and engineers, thirty of them from the University of Barcelona, have just finished the preparation process of the satellite. The launch, from the European Spaceport in Kourou (French Guiana), takes place on 25 October.

 

In order to describe the mission to the general public, a group of researchers from the Department of Astronomy and Meteorology of the University of Barcelona have created the travelling exhibition “One thousand million eyes for one thousand million stars” that was opened this week in the Parc Astronòmic Montsec (PAM), in Lleida.


Gaiaʼs farewell

On Thursday 27 June, Astrium (Toulouse, France), the company where the last actions to prepare the satellite are being done, hosted an observation of the satellite before being launched. The event was attended by Eduard Masana, Carme Jordi and Lola Balaguer, UB researchers and members of Institute of Sciences of the Cosmos (ICCUB).

The group of the UB has worked on several aspects of the mission: from the simulations that are necessary to prepare the data processing system, to the algorithms of the process or the definition of some parts of the instruments, such as photometry filters.
 

Missionʼs objectives

As the exhibition describes, the objective of Gaia mission is to know better the history of the Milky Way, from its origins to present days, by measuring the position, distance and movements of one thousand million stars and studying their physical properties (temperature, luminosity, chemical composition, etc.).

Gaiaʼs observations will be unprecedentedly precise. Gaia will measure one billion stars, roughly 1% of all the stars spread across the Milky Way. Nowadays, the most precise astronomic catalogue includes 120,000 stars and was developed by Hipparcos, an ESAʼs satellite.

 

The space catalogue

Gaia mission is expected to discover hundreds of thousands of new celestial objects, such as extra-solar planets —it is planned to discovered around 15,000— and failed stars, called brown dwarfs. Within our own Solar System, Gaia will also catalogue hundreds of thousands of asteroids. It will generate more than one petabyte of information, in other words, one million giga, which will have to be processed and analysed in order to get results. Gaia will also enable to obtain different parameters for each object, so a map of our Galaxy will be done in 2020.