GAIA spacecraft successfully launched!

The satellite Gaia, from the European Space Agency (ESA), was successfully launched on December 19, 2013, from Europe’s spaceport in Kourou (French Guiana) on a five-year Galaxy mapping mission.

Gaia is an ambitious mission to map one billion stars (1%) in the Milky Way in an attempt to give us the first realistic picture of how our galaxy is constructed

The result will be a three-dimensional map of the Milky Way, allowing astronomers to fully determine its origin and evolution, as by watching stars from different positions, Gaia can build up a picture of the exact distances of stars and how they move.

Apart from creating a 3D map of the Milky Way, Gaia will also shed light on hundreds of thousands of asteroids and comets within our Solar System and seven thousand planets beyond it. It’s also going to study tens of thousands of ‘failed’ stars, called brown dwarfs, as well as twenty thousand emerging, exploding stars, called supernova. Gaia is also expected to provide new tests of Albert Einstein’s relativity theory.