The mission is now in its 11th year. European Space Agency Gaia Space Telescope time
According to the ESA, Gaia was first punctured by a fast-moving micrometeorite and then suffered an electronics failure, which caused the telescope to start sending gigabytes of junk data to operators on Earth.
“Gaia typically transmits more than 25 gigabytes of data to Earth each day, but this amount would be much higher if the spacecraft’s onboard software had not initially eliminated erroneous star detections,” said Edmund Serpell, Gaia’s spacecraft operations engineer. statement
Gaia is located at L2, Lagrange points Sun Earth’s atmosphere Protective Heating Tent
Related: New Gaia data reveals ‘gold mine’ of more than 500,000 undiscovered stars
In April, a speck of space dust blew a hole in Gaia’s shield, allowing a tiny bit of sunlight to enter the asteroid’s interior. The light was about a billionth of the intensity of sunlight reaching Earth’s surface, but it was still bright enough to confuse the telescope’s sensors.
To make matters worse, Gaia would soon run into another problem. Gaia’s cameras are made up of 106 charge-coupled devices (CCDs), electronic components that convert the light that hits them into an electric charge. In May, one of the CCDs failed. Engineers aren’t sure exactly what caused the failure, but it’s possible that Solar storm Aurora
Meanwhile, the consequences of the malfunction are clear: This particular CCD helps Gaia root out false positives. When it wasn’t functioning properly, combined with the confusion caused by the micrometeorite hole, Gaia’s sensor began to glow. Performer
Gaia is far away Earth
For now, the story has a happy ending, but Gaia has already outlived it by nearly twice that amount. space
