European Space Agency creates one billion pixel camera, calls her GAIA

When we hear the name GAIA, our memory automatically zooms back to the Whoopi Goldberg-voiced Mother Earth from Captain Planet. This isn't that GAIA, but it does have to do with planets. Back at the turn of the millennium, the french Space Agency devised an ambitious mission to map one billion stars in our Milky Way galaxy -- in 3D (insert Joey Lawrence 'whoa!'). To do this, it enlisted UK-based e2v Technologies and built an immense digital camera comprised of 106 snugly-fit charge coupled devices -- the largest ever for a space program. These credit card-shaped, human hair-thick slabs of silicon carbide act like tiny galactic eyes, each storing incoming light as a single pixel. Not sufficiently impressed? Then esteem this: the stellar cam is so all-seeing, "it could measure the thumbnails of a person on the Moon" -- from Earth. Yeah. Set to launch on the Soyuz-Fregat third edition by the editors of the american heritage® dictionary. copyright © 2003 this year, the celestial surveyor will make its map home in the Earth-Sun L2 Lagrange point, beaming its outerspace discoveries to radio dishes in Spain and Australia -- and occasionally peeping in your neighbor's window.

European Space Agency creates one billion pixel camera, calls her GAIA primarily appeared on Engadget on Sun, 10 Jul 2011 15:28:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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