A newly launched space craft hopes to map the locations of a billion stars; this sounds impressive but will only cover about one percent of the total stellar population.
The craft, dubbed Gaia, was launched by the U.K. space agency on the back Soyuz launcher, a news release reported.
Soyuz lifted off on the morning of Dec.19; the first firing put Gaia in a temporary orbit at an altitude of about 175 kilometers. The second firing of Fregat 11 sent the craft into transfer orbit.
Gaia is now on its way to a "gravitationally-stable virtual point in space called L2," according to the news release.
The craft will observe a "billion stars with a billion-pixel video camera," The mission hopes to uncover secrets of the origin and evolution of the universe as well as studying gravity, mapping out the universe, and discovering new objects.
"Gaia will be a revolution in our knowledge of the local Universe. For the first time we will have a fair sample of what is out there, where it is, how it is moving, how unseen (dark) matter is distributed, where and when stars formed and where and when the chemical elements of which we are made were created. Gaia will make a huge step towards understanding how the Milky Way came to be formed, and evolved into what we see today. For the first time, we will be able to see the Milky Way in 3-D. In fact in 6-D - where stars are, and how they are moving."
The craft will start sending a "flood" of data back to Earth around Easter of 2014. The entire mission will last for about five years and will produce the amount of information equivalent to 30,000 CD ROMs.
The craft will capture extremely bright objects such as stars and blazers that could be identified by amateurs and even school children.
"A school class can be the first to 'adopt a supernova', observe it with robotic telescopes, such as the Faulkes, and provide critically important science information which we need to understand the new sources. That class will be doing original science, and will be credited for their research contributions" Doctor Heather Campbell, a scientist at Cambridge who is part of the Gaia science alerts analysis team, said in the news release.
