Gaia ‘billion-star surveyor’ lifts off

The European Space Agency (ESA) Gaia mission blasted off on the 19 December 2013 on a Soyuz rocket from Europe's Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana, on a significant mission to study a billion suns.

Gaia is an ambitious mission to chart a three-dimensional map of our Galaxy, the Milky Way, in the process revealing the composition, formation and evolution of the Galaxy. Gaia will provide unprecedented positional and radial velocity measurements with the accuracies needed to produce a stereoscopic and kinematic census of about one billion stars in our Galaxy and throughout the Local Group. This amounts to about 1% of the Galactic stellar population.

• Primary Source

The Guardian, 19.12.13: Gaia space telescope launches on mission to map the Milky Way http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/19/gaia-space-telescope-launches-milky-way-galaxy

Website: European Space Agency: Gaia http://sci.esa.int/gaia/

Deutsche Welle, 19.12.13: Gaia aims for a billion stars as it lifts off for Milky Way 3D mapping mission http://dw.de/p/1AcVi

Wikipedia: Gaia (spacecraft) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia_%28spacecraft%29

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