The billion-star surveyor Gaia's test image of the is "coming into focus."
Once routine measurements begin Gaia will provide a staggering amount of information about the galaxy, including "a dense cluster of stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud," a European Space Agency news release reported.
The purpose of the test image is to "fine tune" the revolutionary equipment, in the future Gaia will rarely send images back to Earth.
"Only small 'cut-outs' [centered] on each of the stars it detects will be sent back to Earth for analysis," the news release reported.
The purpose of the project is to create a detailed map of the Milky Way; it will measure the position of about one percent of the 100 billion stars in our galaxy.
Gaia will scan each of the billion stars about 70 times over the course of five years. It was also look at the "brightness, temperature and chemical composition," of each star. In order to accomplish this Gaia will slowly spin, scanning the sky with two telescopes and "focusing the light from their separate fields simultaneously onto a single digital camera - the largest ever flown in space, with nearly a billion pixels," the news release reported.
In order to do its job correctly the divice must be tediously aligned, focused, and calibrated; this will not be complete for several weeks.
"While all one billion of Gaia's target stars will have been observed during the first six months of operations, repeated observations over five years will be needed to measure their tiny movements to allow astronomers to determine their distances and motions through space," the news release reported.
The final catalogue will not be released for about three years after the conclusion of the five-year-long observations; alerts will be released throughout the project if objects such as supernova are detected.
The amount of data that will be gathered over the course of the mission will be enough to fill up 200, 000 DVDs of data.
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