Posted on December 19, 2017
Do you know the name Gaia?
In Greek mythology, Gaia is the personification of the planet Earth. She is a sort of Mother Earth figure who is the mother of all life on Earth.
But when we say that Gaia was launched on this date in 2013, we of course mean a spacecraft named Gaia. It's a space observatory that was created by the European Space Agency. Its mission is to build the biggest and best 3-D space catalog ever created. The goal is to include a billion objects in space, including planets, stars, comets, asteroids, quasars, and more.
The planned mission is five years, so Gaia may be near the end of its life. However, the mission may be extended up to four years if conditions allow it.
One of the big things about Gaia is that the measurements taken of, say, the yearly motion of a star are really precise -
the equivalence of measuring the size of a pinhead on the Moon, as seen from the Earth!
Scientists can use the data gathered by Gaia, and published in a series of increasingly exact star catalogs, in all sorts of research. One astronomer has used the data to compute the orbit of a dwarf galaxy around the Milky Way Galaxy (our own galaxy). Gaia scientists were also able to detect a supernova in another galaxy.
Also on this date:
It's still time for Las Posadas!
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