EADS to build Gaia for ESA

The European Space Agency has awarded EADS Astrium a contract worth €317 million to develop and build the Gaia satellite. The goal of Gaia’s space mission, currently planned for launch in 2011, is to make the largest, most precise map of the Galaxy to date.

EADS said Gaia would be the most accurate optical astronomy satellite ever built so far. It will continuously scan the sky for at least five years from a point in space known as the second Lagrangian point (or L2), located at about 1.6 million kilometres from Earth, in the opposite direction to the Sun. This position in space offers a very stable thermal environment, very high observing efficiency (since the Sun, Earth and Moon are behind the instrument field of view) and a low radiation environment.

Gaia’s goal is to perform the largest census to date of our Galaxy and build a highly accurate 3D map. The satellite will determine the position, colour and true motion of 1,000 million stars. Gaia will also identify as many as 10,000 planets around other stars, and discover several tens of thousands of new comets and asteroids in our own Solar System.