Jake Kim / Eagle Rock High School11th Grade

Most aerospace innovations are known for terrestrial accomplishments like the X-51 Waverider with benchmark speed or the gravity defying Martin P12 Jetpack. However, the European Space Agency’s Gaia wasn’t intended for anything of the sort. It doesn’t fly at Mach speeds, nor is it a jetpack that can fly 63 miles per hour at an altitude of 8,000 feet. Instead the ESA’s Gaia was built to bring the whole Milky Way galaxy closer than ever to Earth.

Gaia is a launchable observatory, a two-ton satellite mounted with the largest digital camera ever sent to space. The imaging system in the 32-foot satellite contains two telescopes and a 1,000,000,000-pixel camera. This massive imaging power not only allows for the 3D mapping and charting stars, taking an average of 40 million scans per day, but also allows for the comprehension of parallaxes, noting changes to the positioning of the celestial objects over time.

The European Space Agency’s Gaia was cleared for lift off on the 18th of December and was successfully launched atop a Russian-built Soyuz rocket from the European spaceport located in French Guiana at 4am EST on December19th 2013. It is currently on the way to L2 or the second Lagrangian Point, which is located approximately 1 million miles from planet Earth. Even at this great distance, our Sun, Earth and Moon are able to hold the new satellite within orbit. If on schedule, the flying observatory should be able to reach its final destination within 20 days, where it will begin scanning the Milky Way galaxy.

After five and a half years, the Gaia will have one petabyte of information, equivalent to the space of 200,000 standard DVDs. With this information, scientists and astronomers will be able to study each star for chemical composition, temperature, and brightness. Using the brightness of a star they are able to determine the amount of fuel the star is burning, its width, and its distance from earth. By understanding the amount of fuel a star is burning, the scientists are able to calculate the star’s mass, which will then give them the strength of its gravitational pull. This team of experts also hopes to use Gaia in the future to observe comets, asteroids and dying stars that collapse and explode into supernovae.