Out of fuel: groundbreaking Gaia space telescope completes research work
Europe's leading space telescope is running low on fuel and will collect data for the last time on Wednesday. The research data will be available for years.
Artistic representation of Gaia in front of the Milky Way
(Image: ESA, ATG medialab)
ESA's groundbreaking Gaia space telescope is about to end its research work because it is running out of fuel. Tomorrow, Wednesday, the instrument will collect scientific data for the last time, according to the European Space Agency. But even though the instrument will then cease its work, the scientific community can still look forward to a large amount of measurement data; the fourth major catalog is due to be published next year. The fifth and final Gaia Date Release is due at the end of the decade, covering the entire ten and a half years in which the European space telescope has been active.
Much more data to come
Gaia was launched at the end of 2013 and was quickly regarded as perhaps the most important telescope in space, six months after it began its scientific work. Using a gigapixel camera, it continuously photographed the night sky for more than ten years. As it moved around the sun with the Earth, the precise measurement data made it possible to determine the position of billions of stars with increasing accuracy thanks to the so-called parallax measurement. The instrument was intended to lay the foundation for a wide range of further research, and the space telescope has already done just that impressively. This will not change in the foreseeable future, even after its deactivation.
Videos by heise
As the ESA now explains, the device needs its fuel to keep itself precisely aligned in space. This means that around 12 grams of cold gas are lost every day and the supplies will be completely used up by the end of the year. After the research work has been discontinued, the remaining fuel will be used to carry out weeks of tests on the spacecraft, which could help with the design of a successor. The spacecraft will then leave its location at Lagrange point L2 and enter a final heliocentric orbit. It will then be deactivated there in the spring and begin its “well-deserved retirement”.
The discoveries based on the previously published Gaia data include the finding that the last major collision of our Milky Way occurred many billions of years later than previously assumed. The measurement data also revealed two of the earliest fragments of our home galaxy, which collided with it not long after the Big Bang. As a kind of bonus, Gaia has also provided the largest map of active black holes. Most recently, the data from Gaia has also cast doubt on the value previously assumed to be the mass of the Milky Way. There could therefore be less dark matter in our home galaxy than previously thought.
(mho)
