Latest Toulouse facility of Gaia Stories

The largest digital camera ever built for a space mission has been painstakingly mosaiced together from 106 separate electronic detectors. The resulting "billion-pixel array" will serve as the super-sensitive "˜eye' of ESA's Galaxy-mapping Gaia mission. While the naked human eye can see several thousand stars on a clear night, Gaia will map a billion stars within our own Milky Way Galaxy and its neighbors over the course of its five-year mission from 2013, charting their brightness and...