The Gaia spacecraft is not impressed by your camera's megapixel count. This newest spacecraft by the European Space Agency roared into space this morning carrying a digital camera capable of capturing a billion pixels. Its five-year mission: to create the best 3D map of the galaxy ever made.
Over the next few weeks, Gaia will travel to L2, one of the Lagrange Points where the Earth and the sun's gravity cancel each other, allowing a spacecraft to sit undisturbed. From there the mission will map a billion stars, noting features such as their brightness and makeup, and also where they are moving to and how fast they are traveling as they orbit the center of the galaxy. In this way, they will create not simply a catalog of stars, but a moving 3D map of the Milky Way.
Astronomers estimate that our galaxy contains at least 100 billion and possibly as many as 400 billion stars. Gaia's guiders hope to map a billion stars, which, though it would be no more than 1 percent of all the stars in the Milky Way, is a staggering total that could provide a much clearer picture of our cosmic neighborhood.
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The last spacecraft to attempt such a mission was ESA's Hipparcos, which launched in 1989. That mission cataloged just 118,000 stars. Gaia will track 10,000 times more stars, and image each one about 70 times. ESA says that over the course of its time in space, Gaia should also discover many new asteroids, exoplanets, and other space objects by serendipity.
Andrew's from Nebraska. His work has also appeared in Discover, The Awl, Scientific American, Mental Floss, Playboy, and elsewhere. He lives in Brooklyn with two cats and a snake.