A mechanical engineer inside ship Gaia. ESA
Video on 19 December, the European Space Agency (ESA) will launch the Gaia satellite, which is scheduled census billion stars -1% of the total of the Milky Way. This is the first satellite mission that will take these features and Spain will play a role in the mission.
A team from the University of Barcelona consisting 30 people among scientists and engineers provide simulations of the Gaia observations for the other teams can get to process about a petabyte of data.This is just one of the tasks to be out by the Institute of Cosmos Sciences UB (ICCUB) and the Institute for Space Studies of Catalonia (IEEC), which together represents 11% of Spanish participation in the above-mission Spanish presence in the ESA, which is 8% -.
principal investigator and member of Team ICCUB-IEEC, Professor Jordi Torra, has indicated that the Gaia satellite, will “multiply by ten thousand current knowledge of our Galaxy “, get measure positions, distances and motions of a billion stars and study their physical properties, such as age and chemical composition. “
UB Collaboration, step by step
UB and contributed his experience in the satellite Hipparcos, Gaia predecessor, launched in 1989 and managed to analyze 120,000 stars. Now with the new ESA satellite, equipment ICCUB-IEEC has participated in the mission from the beginning and a very prominent role.
So, have actively participated in the scientific design and satellite technology and the development of the system that will process the data provided by Gaia, to be stored in a database from which to extract the first results of scientific use daily.Jordi Torra, who joined the Gaia project in 1998, explained that Gaia generate 50 gigabytes of data daily “to be sent to Earth to be processed “, which means that at the end of the mission have collected 100 terabytes of data, “a significant amount of information that need to be cataloged and analyzed,” he pointed professor.
After participating in the spectrophotometric instrument design, the team participates in the development of models to process photometry mission (in the work unit CU5) needed to obtain the physical parameters of the objects observed as temperature or brightness, reports the UB in a note.
Data Processing Center of Barcelona, ??which includes the Center for Scientific and Academic Services of Catalonia (CESCA) and the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) – is responsible for providing resources to execute reprocessing operations during the mission, simulations and to evaluate the processes in advance.
Team UB also part of the scientific panel of Gaia (GST), which is charged with ensuring that the scientific objectives of the mission have been kept during the construction of the satellite, and the group that controls the data processing chain is appropriate (DPACE). Also coordinate the Spanish Network for the scientific exploitation of Gaia (REG), where all Spanish astrophysicists interested in using Gaia data are included in their research efforts to unify .
also is an active member of the European Network GREAT (Gaia Research for European Astronomy Training). In the future, the team hopes to make a significant contribution in the working group of the c reation, management and dissemination of the final Gaia catalog .
More Spanish participation in Gaia
Spanish industry has also played a prominent role in the Gaia project, such as group SENER engineering and technology, which has designed, manufactured and tested the deployable sunshield satellite , of 11 meters in diameter, and one of the most critical subsystems accuracy of Gaia.
Meanwhile, MIER Communications, a company based in La Garriga (Barcelona), has given the project the equipment installed in the satellite responsible for amplify signal strength that contains the data collected by ates being sent to Earth Gaia.
In addition, the technology firm GMV, based in Barcelona has been part of the international group of more than 300 scientists and engineers preparing processing scientific data captured by Gaia .
The Gaia satellite construction has had a total cost 740 million euros, financed by the ESA, which does not include data processing and scientific exploitation later.
Gaia will be located 1.5 million kilometers from Earth, observe whole sky for five years and repeat 70 times each observation . The launch of the satellite, which weighs 2,000 kilos, is scheduled for the 19th of December and will be from the space base of Kourou (French Guiana) aboard a Soyuz launcher Arianespace.
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