The European Space Agency (ESA) has successfully launched the Gaia spacecraft on a Soyuz rocket from the Kourou spaceport in French Guiana.

Gaia’s main goal is to draw up a 3D map from a representative sample of the stars making up our Milky Way Galaxy, giving new insights into their composition, formation and evolution. To do so it will observe each one of the stars more than 70 times throughout the five-year project. Gaia will communicate with the earth for an average time of eight hours a day; the final data file is expected to be bigger than a petabyte (one million gigabytes).
 

The space observatory will not only measure the exact position of the stars but will also detect other objects making up the Milky Way. The mission is expected to uncover hundreds of thousands of previously unseen objects, ranging from extrasolar planets to failed stars and brown dwarfs. Within our own solar system it will catalogue hundreds of thousands of asteroids.

Spanish industry, boasting an 11% share, has played a key role in the whole Gaia project. GMV has contributed to the GAIA mission from the word go, starting with the initial GAIA Data Access and Analysis Study (GDAAS), which defined mission-data access and analysis. GMV personnel are also participating in the development of the Science Operations Centre (SOC) in ESAC, in charge of verification and validation tasks and coordinating software testing activities, comprising mainly the Astrometric Global Iterative Solution (AGIS), Main Database/First Look, GaiaTools and part of the Gaia Transfer System.

Together with the University of Barcelona (Universitat de Barcelona) and the Catalan Supercomputing Center (Centre de Supercomputació de Catalunya) GMV also forms part of the team in charge of carrying out Initial Data Treatment (IDT) as the first step in the data processing chain. This system is crucial for ensuring that this mission’s final data has the best possible quality. The GAIA satellite will send on the data to the receiving ground station for vetting of its quality. This then kick-starts the processing, in which GMV has also intervened. The data will be processed, archived and distributed to scientific institutes for subsequent analysis and use.

GMV is also responsible for GAIA’s Central Check Out System (CCS), which forms part of the Electrical Ground Support Equipment (EGSE). GMV is in charge of acquiring, installing, configuring and supporting the mission’s CCS, based on Astrium’s Open Center solution.