The mission is now in its 11th year. European Space Agency (ESA) Gaia Space Telescope The telescope was hit by technical problems time In space, it provides precise measurements of the positions and movements of distant stars, providing great benefits to astronomers.
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. statementSo Serpell and his fellow engineers had to scramble to address the problem.
Gaia is located at L2, Lagrange points A point about 1.5 million kilometers (940,000 miles) from Earth. This point is in the Earth’s shadow, where the Earth’s gravitational force is balanced. Sun‘s. There was not even a trace of it. Earth’s atmosphere To burn them up, high-speed micrometeoroids are a common threat. And Gaia has Protective Heating Tent It was designed to protect the observatory from such micrometeorites, but one of them got through.
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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 It lit up the northern sky of the Earth. AuroraIt’s possible that the surge in solar radiation that accompanied the storm simply overwhelmed Gaia’s decade-old electronics.
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 It didn’t exist.
Gaia is far away Earth Before ESA could consider repairs, Gaia’s engineers had to figure out how to address both issues from afar: by adjusting the threshold at which Gaia identifies distant points of light as stars, and by tweaking the telescope’s optics. As a result, the telescope was actually able to transmit better data than before.
For now, the story has a happy ending, but Gaia has already outlived it by nearly twice that amount. space Things don’t always go as originally planned for the mission, and all good things tend to come to an end.
