ESA launches Gaia satellite
The Gaia satellite lifts off into space to map out the first realistic picture of the Milky Way.
PARIS
The European Space Agency (ESA) launched a satellite named Gaia from French Guiana, an overseas French region located on the north Atlantic coast of South America.
The Gaia satellite, launched in a Russian Soyuz rocket from the Sinnamary complex, will map the positions of more than a billion stars in 3D to produce the first realistic picture of the Milky Way Galaxy.
The data will be evaluated by at least 450 scientists in 30 laboratories across Europe.
Gaia will help discover unknown galaxies, asteroids and comets with two highly precise telescopes and a one billion-pixel camera.
Information about the position of celestial objects, as well as their brightness and surface temperature, will be provided through the satellite which has taken more than 70 companies from 16 countries and 20 years to build.
The ESA previously mapped out at least 100 thousand stars with satellite Hipparcos. The one billion stars that Gaia is expected to map out only constitute one percent of all stars in the Milky Way.
Gaia is an abbreviation of Global Astrometric Interferometer for Astrophysics.
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