The launch of Gaia is here [NOT TRANSLATED]
2013-12-18 00:00:00
The countdown comes to the end: tomorrow, December 29, 2013, the Gaia mission of the European Space Agency will be launched at 10:12:19 (GMT) from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guaiana . The launch will be broadcast live in the Classroom 105 of the Faculty of Chemistry of the University of Barcelona (Act program).
This mission, in which the Gaia group of UB-ICC/IEEC has been involved from the start in 1998, aims to measure the positions, distances and speeds of one billion stars with a precision of the order of microseconds arc, which is the same as to see the the eyes of an astronaut on the Moon from Earth.
Gaia is an emblematic mission due to its ability to revolutionize astrophysics in the coming decades –thanks to the precision of astrometric observations– as well as due to such a technological challenge. The project also represents the best example of a technology that has put Europe at the forefront of the field of astrometry from space. [NOT TRANSLATED]