Lift-off for Gaia's billion-star mission

Europe’s most advanced space telescope Gaia, built for the European Space Agency (ESA), will produce a highly accurate 3D map of the galaxy, the Milky Way, and discover and map objects beyond its boundaries.

The Gaia mission is also expected to discover hundreds of thousands of unknown celestial objects, including extra-solar planets and failed stars (brown dwarfs).

Further science impacts anticipated through Gaia include mapping dark matter and finding potentially dangerous asteroids.

Gaia’s telescope draws on expertise developed by Astrium in the field of silicon carbide (SiC) telescopes, such as that used for the space telescope on ESA’s Herschel mission, as well as for all the instruments made by Astrium for Earth observation missions.

‘Gaia is an unparalleled space system: the precision of its instruments and its technical conception once again prove Astrium‘s unique expertise in optical payloads,’ said Eric Béranger, CEO of Astrium Satellites in a statement. ‘Mastering these exceptional technologies enables us to maintain Astrium’s rank as the world leader in the export of Earth observation satellites.’