So Gaia relies on maintaining very accurate pointing at the stars while measuring their position. For this purpose it uses special cold gas (Nitrogen) thrusters with very low flow noise. These cold gas tanks are now empty and Gaia simply cannot continue to operate.
we don’t want it to reactivate in the future and begin transmitting again if its solar panels find sunlight.
Why go to so much work to ensure it can never be turned on again? What harm does it do to move the satellite to a graveyard orbit and just leave it listening?
Sniff, our most successful scientific Spacecraft by publications. The new Voyage 2050 programme certainly provides science topics that could lead to a worthy successor.
Today’s flyby will be the first to significantly ‘tilt’ the spacecraft’s orbit and allow it to see the Sun’s polar regions, which cannot be seen from Earth.
Huh, it never occurred to me that we haven’t seen what the Sun looks like from above or below the plane of the solar system.
I’m confused about what exactly the ring is in the image or the main image at least. There seems to be an enhanced image in the article that highlights the ring more clearly as an outer edge, which makes sense (I suppose).
But I don’t understand what I’m to make of the top image. It’s the diffuse light part of the ring?
I love that we launched a spacecraft with the sole purpose of measuring the positions of as many stars as possible, just because we could. Well done Gaia, and all the teams who worked on it.
Smaller than a strawberry seed, this tiny signal amplifier was produced by the European Space Agency to fill a missing link in current technology, helping to make future radar-observing and telecommunications space missions feasible.
“This integrated circuit is a low noise amplifier, measuring just 1.8 by 0.9 mm across,” explains ESA microwave engineer David Cuadrado-Calle. “Delivering state of the art performance, the low noise amplifier’s task is to boost very faint signals to usable levels.”
esa.int
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