Albisu
Kourou (French Guiana), Dec. 19 (Reuters) -. The GAIA satellite, the more complex European history, telescope successfully lifted off aboard a Russian Soyuz launcher from the European Space Centre in Kourou, in French Guyana, with the mission to census billion stars and build a 3D map of the Milky Way.
That
satellite of the European Space Agency (ESA), which has taken 20 years to develop thanks to a budget of 1,000 million euros, will help to understand the origin and evolution of our galaxy through a catalog one percent of its stars.
Russian Soyuz carrying the GAIA took off at 09.12 GMT, drawing a dense wake upon cleared Kurú dawn as they were lighting the different stages of the rocket.
After 41 minutes and 59 seconds from takeoff, scientists eventually ended the mission launch to applause, hugs and expressions of relief.
But the feeling of the finished work arrived a couple of hours later, with the deployment of GAIA shield, a circular structure of Spanish manufacturing and 10 meters in diameter will ensure optimal conditions for observation at a stable temperature and low ( -170 ° C) which will operate the satellite, over two tons.
“He’s out of a book. seemed we were copying the plan. If all goes so well, you can save fuel and prolong the life of the mission,” he told Efe visibly moved the head of Scientific Exploration and Robotics ESA, Alvaro Giménez, a few meters from the control room in Kourou.
From now on, the telescope will continue traveling for about a month to an orbit 1.5 million kilometers from Earth in a so-called Lagrange points, which provides a stable and ideal location for observations that carried the satellite.
There GAIA
start searching the galaxy with two telescopes with a focal plane combined ten rounded mirrors, a photometer, a spectrometer and astrómetro that grant a precision that would allow him to see clearly from the Moon a beetle walk in the Earth.
That
technology based on silicon carbide, is used to map the Milky Way in three dimensions and conducting a census of about one billion stars, one percent of which inhabit our galaxy, looking around seventy times each astro for five years of life.
Thus, the satellite can determine their brightness, speed and position, including the distance separating Earth, impossible to perform accurately from the balloon surface calculation.
Scientists also hope to discover the satellite million celestial objects like planets outside the solar system, failed stars (brown dwarfs) or asteroids.
“We will see everything that moves” sums Gimenez, who hopes to have a first provisional catalog in two years and a high accuracy within a decade, to the joy of astrophysicists and astronomers around the globe.
addition, GAIA measurements will serve to ratify the General Theory of Relativity by Albert Einstein stated, as the photographs you send the satellite curves reflect the effect of gravity, as predicted by the Nobel prize more than a century ago .
Within four months, passed all the technical adjustments, the GAIA begins sending valid data to Earth, to be recovered by the ‘radioantenas’ 35 meter diameter Cebreros (Spain) and New Norcia (Australia) and processed by computers capable of performing six billion operations per second.
information processing is colossal because the satellite data sent would amount to 2,000 years in a row listening to music or information that can be stored in about 250,000 DVD.
first version of his celestial catalog will be available within two years, but have to wait nearly a decade to have the version with ultimate precision.
GAIA will provide 10,000 times more information than its predecessor, the Hipparcos satellite, which was launched in 1989 and mapped 100,000 stars.
“Hipparcos could see clearly a coin one euro to three miles away. GAIA will see that one euro coin from the Earth to the Moon,” said Gimenez.
GAIA mission is the continuation of the dream of Galileo, already in 129 BC compiled a catalog of a thousand stars in the Milky Way to try to better understand “dark labyrinth that” it is our galaxy.
jaf / ik
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