A rare double whammy of a space attack. European Space AgencyThe Gaia spacecraft was recently hit by a micrometeorite and hit by a solar storm, rendering it unable to function properly, but scientists say the satellite has recovered from the devastating impact and is now back in normal operation.
Gaia orbits Earth in an L2 orbit, more than 932,000 miles (1.5 million kilometers). Lagrange pointsThe gravitational forces of the Earth and Sun combine to form a stable orbit, and the spacecraft’s goal is to create a 3D map of each star in this orbit. milky way.
But in April, meteorite A particle smaller than a grain of sand struck Gaia, damaging the protective shield surrounding its instruments. For months afterward, sunlight filtered through the tiny crack and interfered with the probe’s sensors, according to the ESA. In May, another electronic device failed for unknown reasons, part of the system that allows Gaia to verify its detection of stars, resulting in thousands of false positives.
“Gaia typically transmits more than 25 gigabytes of data to Earth each day, but this amount would be much higher if the spacecraft’s on-board software had not initially eliminated false star detections,” said Edmund Serpell, Gaia spacecraft operations engineer at the European Space Operations Centre. statement“Two recent incidents disrupted this process. As a result, the spacecraft began generating huge numbers of false positives, overwhelming our systems.”
The second failure may have been caused by the same outburst of solar particles from the Sun. Triggered widespread auroras around the world According to the ESA, it will be in May.
While the Gaia team can do little about the spacecraft’s hardware, they can patch the software to keep the spacecraft running and change the threshold at which Gaia classifies an object as a star. Launched in 2013, the spacecraft was originally designed to spend six years in space but has survived for more than a decade.
Gaia has helped astronomers in the past Discovering the Milky Way’s Oldest StarIt was born over 12.5 billion years ago. The probe also A faint companion to a major star and Binary star system The Gaia data allows scientists to see the disk of one star obscuring another. milky way This suggests that it will merge with the neighboring Andromeda galaxy and cause a giant impact. 4.5 billion years later.
Gaia is End of 2025When the propulsion system runs out of gas,
