ESA Gaia team discovers their first Type Ia supernova

An artist’s impression of a Type Ia supernova, the explosion of a white dwarf locked in a binary system with a companion star. 

While other types of supernovas are the explosive demises of massive stars, several times more massive than the Sun, Type Ia supernovas are the end product of their less massive counterparts.

Low-mass stars, with masses similar to the Sun’s, end their lives gently, puffing up their outer layers and leaving behind a compact white dwarf. 

Due to their high density, white dwarfs can exert an intense gravitational pull on a nearby companion star, accreting mass from it until the white dwarf reaches a critical mass that then sparks a violent explosion. 

Credit: ESA/ATG medialab/C. Carreau

While scanning the sky to measure the positions and movements of stars in our Galaxy, ESA's Gaia satellite has discovered its first stellar explosion in another galaxy far, far away.

This powerful event, now named Gaia14aaa, took place in a distant galaxy some 500 million light-years away, and was revealed via a sudden rise in the galaxy's brightness between two Gaia observations separated by one month.

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ESA Gaia, which began its scientific work on 25 July, repeatedly scans the entire sky, so that each of the roughly one billion stars in the final catalogue will be examined an average of 70 times over the next five years.

"This kind of repeated survey comes in handy for studying the changeable nature of the sky," comments Simon Hodgkin from the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge, UK.

Many astronomical sources are variable: some exhibit a regular pattern, with a periodically rising and declining brightness, while others may undergo sudden and dramatic changes.

"As ESA's Gaia goes back to each patch of the sky over and over, we have a chance to spot thousands of 'guest stars' on the celestial tapestry," notes Dr Hodgkin.

"These transient sources can be signposts to some of the most powerful phenomena in the Universe, like this supernova."

Dr Hodgkin is part of Gaia's Science Alert Team, which includes astronomers from the Universities of Cambridge, UK, and Warsaw, Poland, who are combing through the scans in search of unexpected changes.

It did not take long until they found the first 'anomaly' in the form of a sudden spike in the light coming from a distant galaxy, detected on 30 August.

The same galaxy appeared much dimmer when Gaia first looked at it just a month before.

"We immediately thought it might be a supernova, but needed more clues to back up our claim," explains Łukasz Wyrzykowski from the Warsaw University Astronomical Observatory, Poland.

Other powerful cosmic events may resemble a supernova in a distant galaxy, such as outbursts caused by the mass-devouring supermassive black hole at the galaxy centre.

However, in Gaia14aaa, the position of the bright spot of light was slightly offset from the galaxy's core, suggesting that it was unlikely to be related to a central black hole.

Supernova Gaia14aaa and its host galaxy. 

Credit: M. Fraser /S. Hodgkin /L. Wyrzykowski /H. Campbell /N. Blagorodnova /Z. Kostrzewa-Rutkowska /Liverpool Telescope /SDSS

Isaac Newton Telescope (INT)

To confirm the nature of this supernova, the astronomers complemented the Gaia data with more observations from the ground, using the Isaac Newton Telescope (INT) and the robotic Liverpool Telescope on La Palma, in the Canary Islands, Spain.

A high-resolution spectrum, obtained on 3 September with the INT, confirmed not only that the explosion corresponds to a Type Ia supernova, but also provided an estimate of its distance.

This proved that the supernova happened in the galaxy where it was observed.

"This is the first supernova in what we expect to be a long series of discoveries with Gaia," says Timo Prusti, ESA's Gaia Project Scientist.

Supernovas are rare events: only a couple of these explosions happen every century in a typical galaxy, but they are not so rare over the whole sky, if we take into account the hundreds of billions of galaxies that populate the Universe.

In addition to supernovas, Gaia will discover thousands of transient sources of other kinds, stellar explosions on smaller scale than supernovas, flares from young stars coming to life, outbursts caused by black holes that disrupt and devour a nearby star, and possibly some entirely new phenomena never seen before.

"The sky is ablaze with peculiar sources of light, and we are looking forward to probing plenty of those with Gaia in the coming years," concludes Dr Prusti.

ESA Gaia: Largest Space Camera is ready to map a billion stars

Now whizzing through space, 1.5 million km from Earth. 

Credit: ESA-CNES-Arianespace / Optique Vidéo du CSG - G. Barbaste

After its successful launch in December, European Space Agency's (ESA) Gaia has now taken up its position in space and is ready to survey the skies.

With the help of two onboard telescopes focused onto the largest ever space camera, Gaia is estimated to catalogue nearly one billion stars in its 5-year mission.

Like Hipparcos before it, ESA's Gaia will map stars in the Milky Way. It will do this by measuring the brightest billion objects and determine their three-dimensional distribution and velocities.

It also has the ability to measure the temperature, mass, and chemical composition of these billion objects.

Gaia will be able to discern objects up to 400,000 times dimmer than those visible to the naked eye.

The positional accuracy of its measurements are akin to measuring the width of a human hair at a distance of 500 km.

The process will involve scanning each part of the sky an average of 70 times over its five-year mission lifetime.

This means scanning the entire sky twice every 63 days, once through each of the two telescopes, making it a powerful tool for spotting time-evolving phenomena such as binary systems, supernovae, and exoplanets.

Compared to ESA's Hipparcos Space Telescope, ESA's Gaia will be able to measure 500 times the number of stars, extending to objects 1000 times dimmer than the dimmest that Hipparcos could catalogue.

Test image from Gaia: Slightly shaky to start with, but it’ll get there. Credit: ESA/DPAC/Airbus DS

The technology that makes this possible is the largest camera ever launched into space – 940 million pixels.

That is why a lot of effort before launch was on figuring out exactly how to get the huge amount of data Gaia will produce back down to Earth.

When a picture is taken a number of charged-coupled devices (CCDs), the stuff most digital camera sensors are made off, are dedicated to spotting objects before they fall onto the main focal plane.

This allows the instrument to track the objects as they pass and only retain small regions around the object, reducing the file-size needed to be sent to Earth.

In five years it will send only 100 TB of data (1 TB is 1000 GB).

Once the data arrives to Earth, there is a system in place to analyse the data and distribute alerts to ground-based observatories if anything quickly evolving and potentially interesting is spotted, such as supernovae.

The catalogue produced by Gaia is expected to contribute to many areas of astrophysics;

• multiply our database of exotic objects such as' 
• exoplanets, 
• white and brown dwarfs, and 
• supernovae many-fold, contribute to more precise measurements of General Relativity, 
• help to constrain the measurements of the presence and location of dark matter, and 
• give us more accurate information about our galactic neighbourhood and its evolution.

ESA Gaia coming into focus - NGC1818

An ESA Gaia test image of the young star cluster NGC1818 in the Large Magellanic Cloud, taken as part of calibration and testing before the science phase of the mission begins.

The field-of-view is 212 x 212 arcseconds and the image is approximately oriented with north up and east left. 

The integration time of the image was 2.85 seconds and the image covers an area less than 1% of the full ESA Gaia field of view.

Gaia's overall design is optimised for making precise position measurements and the primary mirrors of its twin telescopes are rectangular rather than round.

To best match the images delivered by the telescopes, the pixels in Gaia's focal plane detectors are then also rectangular. 

To produce this image of NGC1818, the image has been resampled onto square pixels. 

Furthermore, to maximise its sensitivity to very faint stars, Gaia's main camera does not use filters and provides wide-band intensity data, not true-colour images.

The false-colour scheme used here relates to intensity only. The real colours and spectral properties of the stars are measured by other Gaia instruments. 

Image courtesy ESA /DPAC /EADS Airbus DS.

ESA's billion-star surveyor Gaia is slowly being brought into focus.

This test image shows a dense cluster of stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of our Milky Way.

Once Gaia starts making routine measurements, it will generate truly enormous amounts of data.

To maximise the key science of the mission, only small 'cut-outs' centred on each of the stars it detects will be sent back to Earth for analysis.

This test picture, taken as part of commissioning the mission to 'fine tune' the behaviour of the instruments, is one of the first proper 'images' to be seen from Gaia, but ironically, it will also be one of the last, as Gaia's main scientific operational mode does not involve sending full images back to Earth.

Gaia was launched on 19 December 2013, and is orbiting around a virtual point in space called L2, 1.5 million kilometres from Earth.

Annotated diagram of the Payload Module

Gaia's goal is to create the most accurate map yet of the Milky Way.

It will make precise measurements of the positions and motions of about 1% of the total population of roughly 100 billion stars in our home Galaxy to help answer questions about its origin and evolution.

Repeatedly scanning the sky, Gaia will observe each of its billion stars an average of 70 times each over five years.

In addition to positions and motions, Gaia will also measure key physical properties of each star, including its brightness, temperature and chemical composition.

To achieve its goal, Gaia will spin slowly, sweeping its two telescopes across the entire sky and focusing the light from their separate fields simultaneously onto a single digital camera - the largest ever flown in space, with nearly a billion pixels.

But first, the telescopes must be aligned and focused, along with precise calibration of the instruments, a painstaking procedure that will take several months before Gaia is ready to enter its five-year operational phase.

ESA GAIA Launch: SOYUZ VS06 - Time Lapse Video

ESA Gaia space observatory aboard Soyuz VS06, lifted off from Europe's Spaceport, French Guiana, on 19 December 2013.

This time-lapse movie shows Gaia sunshield deployment test, the transfer of the Soyuz from the assembly building to the launch pad and the lift off.

Gaia: Milky Way may have formed 'inside-out'

This is a figure illustrating latest Gaia-ESO research findings. 

Credit: Amanda Smith/Institute of Astronomy

A breakthrough using data from the Gaia-ESO project has provided evidence backing up theoretically predicted divisions in the chemical composition of the stars that make up the Milky Way's disc – the vast collection of giant gas clouds and billions of stars that give our Galaxy its 'flying saucer' shape.

By tracking the fast-produced elements, specifically magnesium in this study, astronomers can determine how rapidly different parts of the Milky Way were formed.

The research suggests that stars in the inner regions of the Galactic disc were the first to form, supporting ideas that our Galaxy grew from the inside-out.

Using data from the 8-m VLT in Chile, one of the world's largest telescopes, an international team of astronomers took detailed observations of stars with a wide range of ages and locations in the Galactic disc to accurately determine their 'metallicity' (?): the amount of chemical elements in a star other than hydrogen and helium, the two elements most stars are made from.

Immediately after the Big Bang, the Universe consisted almost entirely of hydrogen and helium, with levels of "contaminant metals" growing over time.

Consequently, older stars have fewer elements in their make-up - so have lower 'metallicity'.

Gerry Gilmore

"The different chemical elements of which stars - and we - are made are created at different rates - some in massive stars which live fast and die young, and others in sun-like stars with more sedate multi-billion-year lifetimes," said Professor Gerry Gilmore, lead investigator on the Gaia-ESO Project.

Massive stars, which have short lives and die as 'core-collapse supernovae', produce huge amounts of magnesium during their explosive death throes.

This catastrophic event can form a neutron star or a black hole, and even trigger the formation of new stars.

The team have shown that older, 'metal-poor' stars inside the Solar Circle – the orbit of our Sun around the centre of the Milky Way, which takes roughly 250 million years to complete – are far more likely to have high levels of magnesium.

The higher level of the element inside the Solar Circle suggests this area contained more stars that "lived fast and die young" in the past.

The stars that lie in the outer regions of the Galactic disc - outside the Solar Circle - are predominantly younger, both 'metal-rich' and 'metal-poor', and have surprisingly low magnesium levels compared to their metallic properties.

During the latest research, the team found that:
Stars in the young, 'thin' disc aged between 0 – 8 billion years all have a similar degree of metallicity, regardless of age in that range, with many of them considered 'metal-rich'.

There is a "steep decline" in metallicity for stars aged over 9 billion years, typical of the 'thick' disc, with no detectable 'metal-rich' stars found at all over this age.

But stars of different ages and metallicity can be found in both discs.

Maria Bergemann

"From what we now know, the Galaxy is not an 'either-or' system. You can find stars of different ages and metal content everywhere!" said Maria Bergemann from Cambridge Institute of Astronomy, who led the study.

"There is no clear separation between the thin and thick disc. The proportion of stars with different properties is not the same in both discs - that's how we know these two discs probably exist – but they could have very different origins."

Added Gilmore: "This study provides exciting new evidence that the inner parts of the Milky Way's thick disc formed much more rapidly than did the thin disc stars, which dominate near our Solar neighbourhood."

ESA Gaia Milky Way Mapping satellite Launch

A European probe roared into space Thursday (Dec. 19), kicking off an ambitious mission to map a billion Milky Way stars in high resolution.

The European Space Agency's Gaia spacecraft lifted off its pad at Europe's spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana at 4:12 a.m. EST (0912 GMT) Thursday, carried aloft by a Russian Soyuz-Fregat rocket.

Gaia is on its way to a gravitationally stable point about 930,000 miles (1.5 million kilometers) from Earth, which it should reach in about three weeks.

Over the next five years, Gaia aims not only to pinpoint the locations of 1 billion stars in our Milky Way galaxy, but also to determine where these stars are moving, what they are made of and how luminous they are.

These are all steps to help scientists better understand the history of the universe, ESA officials have said.

As a side benefit, Gaia's powerful twin telescopes will likely find thousands of new exoplanets, asteroids and other small, faint and hard-to-see objects.

‪"Gaia will conduct the biggest cosmic census yet, charting the positions, motions and characteristics of a billion stars to create the most precise 3D map of our Milky Way," ESA officials said in a statement.

ESA Gaia: Secured inside its fairing

ESA’s billion-star surveyor Gaia, less than a week from launch, is now tucked up inside the fairing that will protect it during the first few minutes of ascent into space.

Last week, Gaia was loaded with the propellants it will need to journey to its ‘L2’ destination, a gravitationally stable location 1.5 million km away from Earth, from where it will survey our Milky Way galaxy.

After fuelling, it was mounted on the Soyuz adapter and added to the Fregat upper stage, which will boost Gaia towards L2.

Meanwhile, the basic assembly of Soyuz – the boosters, core stage and third stage – has been completed in its integration building.

In the coming days, the Soyuz lower stages and the upper assembly containing Gaia will be transported to the launch pad and mated.

Launch is scheduled for 9:12:19 GMT (10:12:19 CET) on 19 December.

ESA Space probe Gaia searches for Galaxy's dark energy

Gaia will map the galaxy with incredible accuracy. 

Photograph: D Ducros/ESA/B. Fugate (FASORtronics)/ESO

European scientists are preparing to launch a probe that will transform our understanding of our galaxy.

The ESA spacecraft Gaia, will carry the world's biggest, most accurate camera which it will use to pinpoint more than a billion stars with unprecedented precision and create a 3D map of the Milky Way.

The vast amounts of data generated by the £2bn robot spacecraft – built by the European Space Agency – will reveal how the Milky Way formed and how it will evolve over the next few billion years.

In addition, Gaia will locate hundreds of thousands of distant planets in orbit around other stars; survey asteroids that orbit close to our own Sun, giving warnings of any on a collision course with Earth; and provide clues about dark energy, the mysterious force that is thought to permeate space and which is pushing the universe apart.

"We are going to rewrite every star chart and every astronomy book that we have written over the centuries," said Professor Mark McCaughrean, ESA's senior scientific adviser.

"Thanks to Gaia, we will find out how the Milky Way was put together. And for good measure it will provide us with an early warning system for asteroids heading towards Earth."

The two-tonne Gaia probe, which has taken more than a decade to build, is set for a 20 December launch on a Russian Soyuz rocket from ESA's spaceport in French Guiana and, once in orbit, will take several months to prepare its delicate instruments for use. The probe will then take five years to complete surveys of the galaxy.

"During its lifetime, Gaia will log the position, the brightness and the temperature of every visible celestial object that falls within its field of view," said Gaia project scientist Jos de Bruijne. "We will do that for about one billion stars in the Milky Way."

The one billion pixel camera on board Gaia contains more than 100 separate electronic detectors and can make measurements of stunning precision.

"It can measure star positions with an accuracy of 10 micro-arc seconds," said Professor Gerry Gilmore, a lead scientist for the mission.

"That means it can locate stars with an accuracy equivalent to the pinpointing of a shirt button on the Moon. Once Gaia has completed its five-year survey, we will know where everything is inside our galaxy – for the first time – and that will help us answer one critical set of questions: when, how and out of what did the Milky Way form?"

Gaia will orbit round the Sun every year, allowing it to take photographs of stars from slightly different positions in space. In this way it will be able to create a 3D map of the Milky Way.

Its instruments will also be able to detect how these stars are moving in space as they revolve round the centre of our galaxy.

Once we have plotted how stars are moving around the Milky Way, we will start to understand how our galaxy formed.

We believe it did so partly by condensing out of an ancient dust cloud and partly by absorbing other, smaller galaxies in our part of the universe," added McCaughrean.

"And the lessons we learn about our own galaxy's birth will be crucial in helping us understand how other galaxies formed. This is one of the big issues that concerns modern astronomy and Gaia is going to help solve it."

ESA GAIA Launch delayed by technical issue

The European Space Agency says it will delay the launch of a galaxy-mapping spacecraft due to a technical issue with some on-board components.

The launch of the Gaia mission -- intended to survey billions of stars to create a precise 3-D map of our Milky Way galaxy -- was postponed Tuesday after a technical issue was identified in another satellite already in orbit that shares some components with the Gaia spacecraft.

To avoid potential problems, the components on Gaia -- two transponders generating timing signals for down-linking the science telemetry -- will be replaced, the ESA's Paris headquarters announced Wednesday.

The transponders will be removed from Gaia, currently at the ESA Kourou spaceport in French Guiana, and returned to Europe where the potentially faulty components will be replaced and verified, the agency said.

The change means it will not be possible to meet the previously targeted launch date of Nov. 20, ESA scientists said; the next available launch window is Dec. 17 to Jan. 20, 2014.

ESA's billion-star surveyor Gaia counts down to launch

Gaia mapping the stars of the Milky Way. Credit: ESA/ATG medialab; background: ESO/S. Brunier

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.

The Gaia Deployable Sunshield Assembly (DSA) during deployment testing in the S1B integration building at Europe's spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana, on 10 October 2013. 

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.

ESA Gaia spacecraft: SENER Sunshield Installation

The Gaia spacecraft is inside the cleanroom at Kourou, where the temperature is maintained at a constant 23 degrees.

Air is circulated through filters to preserve a clean environment, and the humidity in the cleanroom will be kept at about 50%.

In the airlock leading to the cleanroom, the Astrium Assembly, Integration and Testing (AIT) team and the SENER Sunshield team are getting ready to start the first shift of the day.

The Astrium AIT team has the delicate task of putting together all the elements that make up the spacecraft.

The sunshield is one of the very last parts to be added to the spacecraft, and for that phase they work together with the SENER team.

The structural skeleton of the sunshield is made up of 12 frames of carbon fibre tubes, split into 4 quarters of 3 frames each.

Each quarter has to be lifted with an overhead crane from its transport frame, smoothly placed on the spacecraft, and carefully aligned before it is fastened in its final position.

Read more at the ESA GAIA Portal

ESA Launch preparations begin for Gaia galaxy-mapper

Artist's concept of the Gaia spacecraft. 

Credit: ESA/ ATG medialab; background image: ESO/S. Brunier

Europe’s new eye on the galaxy arrived in French Guiana on Friday, beginning three months of flight preparations before liftoff on a Soyuz rocket in November to commence a survey of a billion stars and chart their chaotic motion in the Milky Way galaxy.

The Gaia observatory will be stationed a million miles from Earth, its dual telescopes sweeping across the sky with the sensitivity to plot the exact locations and movements of stars, detect the signatures of alien worlds, and spot icy dwarf planets on the outer frontier of the solar system.

The breadth of Gaia’s scientific promise ranges from scanning the Milky Way to create a three-dimensional map of the galaxy to the discovery of asteroids in Earth's neighborhood.

Scientists say Gaia could return data leading to the discovery of up to 2,000 planets around other stars – mostly Jupiter-sized gas giants.

And the European space mission has the precision to test tenets of Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity by observing how the pull of the sun and planets bend starlight before it reaches Gaia’s apertures.

In five years, Gaia will collect a petabyte of data, enough to fill 1.5 million compact discs. It will see a billion stars, more than ever observed by any other mission, and use information about those objects to study the origin and evolution of the Milky Way.

“The estimate of the number of stars in the Milky Way is between 100 and 200 billion stars, so we observe between one-half and one percent of these stars,” said Timo Prusti, Gaia’s project scientist at the European Space Agency.

“Because of the completeness of Gaia to a limiting magnitude, this proving of 1 percent of these objects will help us reconstruct the remaining part. We’re not going to take a full census of the Milky Way, but we are going to look at a billion stars and we’ll have enough statistical power to deduce the structure of the Milky Way.”

A team of scientists and engineers has worked on Gaia since the mission was approved by the European Space Agency in 2000. The mission’s cost is 740 million euros, or approximately $990 million.

After of 13 years of development, design reviews, construction and testing, Gaia is one step closer to the launch pad.

Liftoff is scheduled for Nov. 20 at 0857 GMT (3:57 a.m. EST; 5:57 a.m. local time) aboard a Europeanized version of Russia’s Soyuz rocket.

The mission will mark the seventh flight of a Soyuz booster from French Guiana, and a Fregat upper stage will propel Gaia on a trajectory toward the L2 Lagrange point about a million miles from the night side of Earth, where gravity from the Earth and sun balance a satellite’s motion.

ESA's GAIA: Billion-pixel space camera passes critical tests

Artist impression of GAIA in orbit observing and monitoring the Milky Way.

The most powerful camera ever designed for space is on track for launch next year following punishing tests to prove it can withstand that environment.

The European Space Agency's Gaia mission will scan the sky with a one-billion pixel detector, producing a 3D map of the Milky Way from its location 1.5 billion km from Earth.

Two telescopes aboard the spacecraft will chart the sky from an orbit around the Sun over five years, noting the position, motion, colour, brightess and composition of around a billion stars in our own galaxy and beyond. These observations will help astronomers learn how our galaxy formed and evolved.

Gaia is also designed to photograph large numbers of other celestial bodies, from asteroids in our own Solar System to more distant galaxies and around 500,000 quasars near the edge of the Universe.

The probe's camera is made up of 106 sensitive electronic detectors made by UK company e2v Technologies, of Chelmsford, Essex, who have also supplied imaging systems for the Curiosity probe now on Mars.

These are basically advanced versions of the chips found in home digital cameras. They were put together like a mosaic to make one huge sensor by EADS scientists at Toulouse, France, for the European Space Agency.

Each detector is slightly smaller than a credit card but thinner than a human hair. Together they are powerful enough to record stars up to a million times fainter than the eye can see.

Gaia is due to be launched by a Soyuz-Fregat rocket from Baikonur in Kazakhstan. When it arrives at the spot called a Lagrangian point (L2) it will fly in a naturally synchronised orbit with Earth and operate at a super-chilled temperature of –110°C.

A giant sunshade on the spacecraft will protect the instruments by keeping them permanently shielded from the heat of the Sun.

Scientists at Toulouse recently checked that Gaia’s service module, housing electronic units to run the science instruments, as well as the units that provide the spacecraft resources, such as thermal control, propulsion, communication, and attitude and orbit control, would function OK in extreme conditions.

During 19 days of tests, they enclosed it in a barrel-shaped chamber at Intespace's test facility where Gaia was subject to vacuum conditions and subjected to a range of temperatures.

The process was similar to that which the James Webb Space Telescope will undergo inside a revamped chamber for NASA.

It experienced temperatures as low as –170°C and tests verified that the spacecraft's instruments could still work properly.

Gaia Project Manager Giuseppe Sarri said: “The thermal tests went very well; all measurements were close to predictions and the spacecraft proved to be robust with stable behaviour.”

He added: “The latest thermal test marks a major milestone achieved in the development of Gaia,” says Giuseppe. “It demonstrated that the service module is compatible with working in space and that we are on track for launch by the end of next year.”

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