In response to the problem, ESA requested Arianespace-the Paris-headquartered launch services organization, which operates the Soyuz, Vega, and Ariane 5 vehicles from Kourou-to postpone the launch. “Gaia shares some of the components involved in this technical issue,” ESA highlighted, “and prompt notification of this problem has allowed engineers working on the final preparations for Gaia’s launch to take additional precautionary measures.” The transponders are built by Thales Alenia, and, according to, the problem may have been associated with a transponder issue with the Thales-built O3B network of telecommunications satellites, the first four of which were boosted into a medium Earth orbit in June 2013. Since the 4,480-pound (2,030-kg) spacecraft was already in French Guiana at the time, the transponders were removed and returned to their manufacturer in Europe for replacement, verification, and return to the South American launch site for integration and testing. Previously scheduled for launch on 20 November, ESA reported in late October that it would delay the mission after “a technical issue was identified in another satellite already in orbit.” It was explained that the issue centered on the need to replace a pair of transponders which Gaia will use to generate its timing signals and downlink science telemetry. Gaia is encapsulated within its protective payload fairing at the Guiana Space Centre on Thursday, 12 December. In the coming days, the Soyuz lower stages and the upper assembly containing Gaia will be transported to the launch pad and mated.” Designated Soyuz Flight VS06, this will be Arianespace’s sixth mission with the Russian-built rocket from French Guiana since its debut in October 2011. “Meanwhile, the basic assembly of Soyuz,” noted ESA, “the boosters, core stage and third stage, has been completed in its integration building. After this operation, Gaia was mounted onto the Soyuz adapter and added to the Fregat upper stage. The launch has been delayed since October, due to the need to replace a pair of transponders which Gaia will use to generate timing signals and downlink its science telemetry.Īccording to an ESA announcement on Friday, 13 December, the spacecraft has been encapsulated within its 37.4-foot-tall (11.4-meter) protective payload fairing, having been loaded last week with propellants to enable it to reach its “Lissajous” orbit around the Earth-Sun L2 Lagrangian Point, a position about 930,000 miles (1.5 million km) beyond the Home Planet, at which the gravitational influences of both celestial bodies meet in balance. Liftoff of the $1.2 billion mission is scheduled to occur atop a Soyuz ST-B booster and Fregat-FT upper stage from the Guiana Space Centre in Kourou, French Guiana, at 6:12:19 a.m. Image Credit: ESAĪfter many delays, the European Space Agency (ESA) is ready to launch its ambitious Gaia mission to observe and catalog around 1 billion astronomical objects-or approximately 1 percent of the entire population of our Milky Way Galaxy-on Thursday, 19 December. With a total data volume of around one petabyte, Gaia will also help to strengthen the expertise of German academia and industry in the fields of Big Data processing, machine learning and artificial intelligence, as well as providing us with entirely new insights into the number, composition and distribution of stars and other celestial bodies.Artist’s concept of the Gaia mission. It has already proven itself extremely successful at this task so far. “Gaia is gathering information on the positions and velocities of approximately two billion objects in the Milky Way and distant galaxies. “This marks another step towards our objective of completing a high-precision, three-dimensional optical survey of the entire sky,” says Walther Pelzer, Member of the German Aerospace Center (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt DLR) Executive Board and Head of the DLR Space Administration. The first instalment of the catalogue’s third data release – the Gaia Early Data Release 3 (Gaia EDR3) – was published on 3 December 2020. The Gaia mission is engaged in an ambitious project – the creation of the most extensive and accurate star catalogue of all time.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |