GAIA - A billion eyes on the skies
Friday, October 21, 2011 - 10:30
in Astronomy & Space
Its name is GAIA and its the perhaps the most ambitious project which has ever faced the European Space Agency. Scheduled to launch in 2013, this new breed of space telescope will stately progress to Lagrange Point 2, where it will spend the next five years. Its mission? To create the largest and most precise three dimensional chart of our Galaxy by providing unprecedented positional and radial velocity measurements for about one billion stars in our Galaxy and throughout the Local Group.