A rare double whammy of a space attack. European Space Agency The 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 points milky way
But in April, meteorite
“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
The second failure may have been caused by the same outburst of solar particles from the Sun. Triggered widespread auroras around the world
Related: A 13-billion-year-old “stellar stream” discovered near the center of the Milky Way may be one of the earliest building blocks of the Milky Way galaxy.
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 Star A faint companion to a major star Binary star system 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 2025
