ESA's billion-star surveyor Gaia will be launched from Europe's spaceport in Kourou on 20 November to begin a five-year mission to map the stars with unprecedented precision.
Gaia's main goal is to create a highly accurate 3D map of our Milky Way Galaxy by repeatedly observing a billion stars to determine their positions in space and their movement through it.
Other measurements will assess the vital physical properties of each star, including temperature, luminosity and composition. The resulting census will allow astronomers to determine the origin and the evolution of our Galaxy.
Gaia will map the stars from an orbit around the Sun, near a location some 1.5 million km beyond Earth's orbit known as the L2 Lagrangian point.
The spacecraft will spin slowly, sweeping its two telescopes across the entire sky and focusing their light simultaneously onto a single digital camera, the largest ever flown in space – it has nearly a billion pixels.
For the last two months Gaia has been rigorously tested in Kourou as part of the launch campaign.
"Getting ready for launch is an extremely busy phase for the mission teams, but it's also extremely exciting and rewarding to see our mission so close to launch," says Giuseppe Sarri, ESA's Gaia project manager.
Credit: ESA–M. Pedoussaut, 2013
Earlier this month the spacecraft's sunshield passed the final deployment test in the cleanroom in Kourou. It has now been stowed in its final configuration ready for the launch.
Shortly after launch, the sunshield will be deployed, forming a 10.5 m-wide 'skirt' around Gaia's base.
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