Last commands were sent to ESA’s Gaia satellite, and after a dozen years after scanning the galaxy, the spacecraft closes its computers and raises a pension orbit around the sun.
This has been proven to be a difficult job. Gaia, released on December 19, 2013, was deliberately designed to be deliberately flexible and had multiple spare computer systems to restart the satellite in case of radiation storms and micrieteorite strikes (the second dead Last year) and Boffins in Europe’s Space Agency not to do I want Gaia to restart.
“At the end of his duty, closing a spacecraft seems like a simple enough job,” comment Gaia spacecraft operator Tiago Nogueira. “But the spacecraft really doesn’t want to close.”
“We needed to design a strategy of systematic selection and disabling the backup layers that protect Gaia for so long, because we do not want to re -activate in the future and start to convey the solar panels again.”
As part of the closure process, the GAIA team rewrite the sections of the hard drive with the names of more than 1,500 people working in the project. This will continue as long as it is a spacecraft that will break the key software and upload messages to some members of the team on the software.
“Today, I was responsible for disrupting Gaia’s processor modules to ensure that the built -in software will never start again after closing the spacecraft after closing the spacecraft.”
“I have mixed feelings between excitement for these important end -of -life operations and the sadness of saying goodbye to a spacecraft that I have been working on for more than five years. I am very happy to be part of this incredible task.”
Gaia is designed to map the Milky Way in three dimensions by recording the position, movements and distance of stars, planets and comets beyond the Milky Way and beyond. He does this by photographing objects over and over again for five years. The resulting 200 TB data is then analyzed in the Earth to map the sky after being compressed and transmitted in 3 Mbit/s.
To date, Gaia has gone higher than two billion stars after three trillion observations and made some important discoveries – at least our galaxy is probably swinging a little after a previous collision with another galaxy. If we continue to collide with Andromeda Galaxy in about 4.5 billion years, this wobble may worse.
He also gave us a much better idea of where the solar system was on the galactic disk and calculated that we were approaching the heart of the Milky Way and accelerating at about 0.23 nanometer/s.2. In addition, he found the closest black hole to the earth called Gaia BH1, about 1,600 light years.
Gaia Project Scientist Johannes Sahlmann, “Gaia’s comprehensive data bulletins affect almost all disciplines in astrophysical research and almost all the disciplines in astronomy.” He said.
The mapping data sent back from the GAIA were used to inform the future astronomical tasks, and Gaia’s successor was already proposed. Gaianir (near Gaia Infra-Red) is designed to perform the same match, but it is designed at different wavelengths, but the imaging hardware does not end yet.
In the last few weeks, the ground control has tested systems, including drive to see that it lasted more than a dozen years. On Thursday, the engines have been used one last time to bring the spacecraft closer to the sun, and Gaia is currently in a safe park orbit of 6.2 million miles (10 million kilometers) from Earth and does not pose a danger of hitting us for at least one century.
Then, the ESA team began to close the individual components and disrupt the software that could restart them. The communication subsystem and the central computer would be closed and now Gaia is no longer operational, but if the data on the hard drives decides to take it at some point in the future, it will serve as a time capsule.
“We will never forget Gaia and Gaia will never forget us,” Gaia Mission Manager Uwe Lammers said. ®
