3.5 meters, a diameter of 10 meters and a total weight of 2 tons. The impressive French Gaia telescope will take off Thursday Guyana. In reality, Gaia has two telescopes. They are capable of detecting a
3.5 meters, a diameter of 10 meters and a total weight of 2 tons. The impressive French Gaia telescope will take off Thursday Guyana. In reality, Gaia has two telescopes. They are capable of detecting a 400,000 times lower than that visible to the naked eye but also equivalent to measure the diameter of a hair at a distance of 1000 km light.
High photographic precision. To fulfill its mission well realize a 3D atlas of the Milky Way, Gaia has a Photographic sensor billion pixels. For comparison, a conventional digital camera has approximately 12 million pixels.
Solar Energy. to function, the telescope will be equipped with, among other things, solar panels with a power of 1,900 watts. Much more powerful than those used by individuals to harvest energy, which in turn revolve around 200W of solar panels.
data en masse. To transmit the collected images, Gaia will be connected to the Earth at a rate of 5 megabits per second. Data will be sent for eight hours and daily. In total, this amounts to a petabyte is a million-gigabytes-of data for the five year mission.
Three instruments. The telescope also has three instruments. An astronomical instrument enabling it to determine the position, movement and distance of stars, a photometric instrument to measure their brightness and color and a spectrometer to specify the type of their light
With all this equipment, Gaia should report by 2019 or 2020, a three-dimensional mapping of our galaxy, the Milky Way. In all, nearly a billion stars that will be mapped, an impressive number at first sight but that represents only 1% of star bursts in our galaxy.