Billion Pixel Camera to Map Milky Way
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A total of 106 CCDs make up Gaia's focal plane. Technicians from Astrium France, the Gaia mission's prime contractor, are seen bolting and aligning the CCDs onto their support structure, at the company's facility in Toulouse.
Image Credit: ESA / Astrium
Assembled from 106 separate electronic devices, the largest digital camera ever built for a space mission will provide the “digital eye” for the ESA’s “Gaia” galaxy mapping mission.
During Gaia’s five-year mission the craft is slated to map over a billion stars in our Milky Way galaxy, as well as neighboring galaxies. Â Gaia will chart the brightness of the stars, their spectral characteristics, and their positions.Â
Assembled in France by prime contractor Astrium, the billion pixel array measures 1/2 by 1 meter. Â The array is comprised of similar, but more advanced CCDs, than the average CCD found in consumer-grade digital cameras.
Taking nearly a month to do so, technicians carefully placed each CCD in the support structure, with only a 1 mm gap between each CCD. The precision work resulted in roughly four CCD’s being placed into the support structure each day.Â
“The mounting and precise alignment of the 106 CCDs is a key step in the assembly of the flight model focal plane assembly,” said Philippe Garé, ESA’s Gaia payload manager.
According to the ESA press release:  ” The completed mosaic is arranged in seven rows of CCDs. The main array comprises 102 detectors dedicated to star detection. Four others check the image quality of each telescope and the stability of the 106.5º angle between the two telescopes that Gaia uses to obtain stereo views of stars. “
Currently scheduled to launch in 2013, Gaia’s 3-D star map aims to help researchers better understand our Milky Way galaxy with a sample of 1% of the stars in our galaxy. In addition to sampling the Milky Way, Gaia will also be tasked with sampling objects in our Solar System, distant galaxies and quasars near the edge of the observable Universe.
If you’d like to learn more about Gaia, you can visit the Gaia site at:Â http://sci.esa.int/science-e/www/area/index.cfm?fareaid=26
Source:ESA/AAAS Press Release
Ray Sanders is a Sci-Fi geek, astronomer and blogger. Currently researching variable stars at Arizona State University, he writes for Universe Today, The Planetary Society blog, and his own blog, Dear Astronomer
2012-12-04 08:06:20
Source: http://www.dearastronomer.com/2011/07/06/billion-pixel-camera-to-map-milky-way/
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