Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astrophysics
Scientific paper
Nov 2009
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2009sf2a.conf...41d&link_type=abstract
SF2A-2009: Proceedings of the Annual meeting of the French Society of Astronomy and Astrophysics, held 29 June - 4 July 2009 in
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astrophysics
Scientific paper
Gaia, ESA's ambitious astrometric mission due for launch in spring 2012, will provide multi-epoch, micro-arcsecond astrometric and milli-magnitude photometric data for the brightest one billion objects in the sky, down to at least magnitude 20. Spectroscopic data will simultaneously be collected for the subset of the brightest 100 million stars, down to about magnitude 17. This massive data volume will allow astronomers to reconstruct the structure, evolution, and formation history of our galaxy, the Milky Way. It will also revolutionise studies of the solar system and stellar physics and will contribute to diverse research areas, from extra-solar planets to general relativity.
Underlying Gaia's scientific harvest will lie a catalogue, built on the space-based measurements. During the 5-year nominal operational lifetime, Gaia's payload, with at its heart a CCD mosaic containing nearly 1 billion pixels, will autonomously detect all objects of interest and observe them throughout their passage of the focal plane. This contribution addresses the summer-2009 development status of the Gaia spacecraft, with particular emphasis on the torus and the deployable sunshield assembly. These two sub-systems reached important milestones on the day this presentation was orally delivered to the SF2A, namely 29 June 2009. On this day, the qualification model of the sunshield arrived at the ESTEC test facilities for thermal tests inside the Large Space Simulator. On the same day, the torus brazing was successfully~concluded.
de Bruijne Jos H. J.
Erdmann Martin
Escolar D.
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