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Construction of ESA Galaxy Mapping Satellite Completed
coondoggie writes with an article in Network World. From the article: "The European Space Agency says it has completed what it calls the largest digital camera ever built for a space mission — a one billion pixel array camera that will help create a three-dimensional picture of the Milky Way Galaxy. Set to be launched onboard the ESA's galaxy-mapping Gaia mission in 2013, the digital camera was 'mosaicked together from 106 separate electronic detectors.' ESA says that Gaia's measurements will be so accurate that, if it were on Earth, it could measure the thumbnails of a person on the Moon."
No, only if we could leave low Earth orbit and actually use said map.
But could it measure a Library of Congress of Volkswagens full of ping-pong balls on an aircraft carrier?
In a related story, Transcenic Inc filed a patent infringement sue against Google, Microsoft, MapQuest, and AOL for allegedly violating their 3D mapping technology.
Guess who Transcenic Inc is targeting next?
Note: this is post is meant to be humorous. I realize that patent doesn't apply in this case. Not without the Chewbacca defense at least.
Can it take a picture of the American flag on the moon? I'm just curious to see if it's dirty.
if they pointed it back towards Earth, it could be used to spy on us.
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To avoid any confusion, we have finished the assembly of the focal plane assembly (i.e. those 106 large CCDs), but not the full-up satellite itself. That still has a way to go, with launch likely at the end of 2012 or early 2013. But it's nevertheless a great achievement to have the huge detector array done and is a real milestone for us.
Also, Gaia isn't taking pretty pictures of the sky per se: via repeated scans over the sky, it's going to provide extremely accurate positions and velocities for about one billion stars in the Milky Way, allowing us to trace their motions back (and forward) in time, and thus understand how the Milky Way was put together in the first place. It does much, much more than that, so if you're interested, I suggest you follow the link in the original submission for more.
(DIsclosure: I work for ESA and am close to the project)
Doubtful. NASA survives on a shoestring budget.
And as to why we were able to get to the moon, but can't now, remember that in the 60's in the middle of Vietnam, NASA had more funding than the DoD. Now NASA's budget is less than the cost of air conditioning for the DoD. And people still bitch and moan about how much NASA is spending.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
"And really stupid people still bitch and moan about how much NASA is spending."
Fixed that for you.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
By the scale of the upcoming James Web Space Telescope or even by the Hubble Space Telescope, GAIA has some pretty small primary mirrors (1.45m). Hell, there are probably some amateurs with telescopes with bigger mirrors than that (though not 1.5 million kilometers in space!). I'm amazed that with such small mirrors it will have the sensitivity to do all that is claimed it will like find (hopefully) tens of thousands of brown dwarfs which are very dim (hence the name). (Of course ACCURACY not sensitivity is the main goal of this thing, that's why even though it could have the resolution to pinpoint a thumbnail on the moon it couldn't see it unless it was a very bright thumb!)
Still I am not a professional astronomer and since this is being done by the same(?) people as who created hipparcus, the previous spacecraft of this type, I'm optimistic that it will be equally successful. Someday we can hope here will be a version of this with really big mirrors, maybe that will allow us to get the remaining 99% of the galaxy. Still to think that soon we may have a pretty good 3D model of the galaxy (with a billion 3D data points) is amazing considering that the only comparable example of this was in Star Trek Voyager's "Map Room" set several centuries in the future! And they were still lost!
If one of the goals of astronomy is to show humanity's place in the universe, I think this goes a long way to fulfilling it. I really really want the 3D dataset when it comes out after 2018 so I can take my own virtual voyages through the milky way!
here
LEO is 500x closer than the moon. Nah, you're right, they'd never :-)
Realistically, other than the silliness of it (and the atmospheric distortion), the camera only has a billion pixels (and really great optics). If they're trying to focus in really great detail, they can't cover that many people or that much area at once. 1000 people would be a megapixel each (so wear your hats, folks), but if you were building a spy satellite instead of one intended for deep astronomy pixels, you could probably do a good job of tracking individuals moving around.
Bill Stewart
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Turn off your computer now. Also turn off your electricity and water, stop eating any foodstuffs not hunted (by hand) or gathered in the wild, take off any clothes you're wearing that aren't made from animal hides or woven grass, and go chip some tools out of flint. Actually, scratch that last part -- who needs to waste time on researching how to break perfectly good rocks when you can just pick them up and throw them at things? Be careful, though; you don't want the fire in your cave to go out, since it can be hard to find a new source.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Was your great grandpappy one of those who was laughing at the Wright brothers and saying "If man were meant to fly, he'd have wings."?
Or are you just a researcher whose proposal didn't get funded?
Yup. There was someone ranting one day about how much NASA spends, so I took the time to go through the federal budget numbers, break it down, put it back together, and showed how insignificant the NASA budget was compared to other things that we really don't need and shouldn't be doing.
Consider how much money has been put into new fighter aircraft, when there isn't an enemy with the capability of deploying aircraft to even get to CONUS. Some of the projects are dropped after spending billions, and not a single aircraft has made it to production. I could go on for hours about the DoD spending, and how it's not helpful in the least to the people of the United States. The government claims these wars we're fighting now are to help Americans, but there hasn't been a legitimate threat of war by any country against CONUS since WWII.
Even during the cold war, the threats were inflated by both sides, and the military buildup existed as more of a show of force to their own citizens, than to scare the enemy. Instead of this huge wartime budget that we've been burying ourselves with, this could easily be peace time. That's only the financial side of it. The discussion of the lives of our soldiers, both in deaths and life changing effects could be nil, *AND* we could have had sizable research stations on the moon, Mars, and other objects in this solar system. Instead, we're looking at the last launch of the only American spacecraft capable of carrying humans on Friday morning. Our only fallback plan is the rough equivalent of selling your car, and hitching rides with your neighbors to get anywhere. That's particularly odd that we're now to depend on our cold war enemies to furnish our only way to space. We've forgiven them, but still have harsh sanctions against Cuba for housing a few Russian missiles decades ago, and sending them back to Russia years before most people reading this were ever born. That's November 1962, for those who may be wondering.
How much is wasted continuing the nonsense against an enemy who hasn't done anything against us in almost 50 years?
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
computers existed before NASA by a number of years
foodstuffs not gathered in the wild is cultivation, and there are plenty of people who might lay claim to that before NASA
The Greeks had woven fabric, synthetic development was during WWII for military reasons
When you throw rocks at bigger rocks you break them, it might help your grasp on reality
and that fire bit is amusing considering a lot of people tend fires in their lives daily, whether its a pilot light for the furnace or a fire out side of a tent
Thanks NASA for computers, food cultivation, food canning/freezing, woven fabric, nylon fabric, physics, and fire!
Did we miss any?
Did we miss any?
In your case, what you're missing is the point, by a mile. This isn't about NASA. It's about the overall value of research, without which we would all still be living in caves and scratching bare-handed in the dirt. If you don't accept that, that's your privilege, but you should have the courage to act on your beliefs, which means GTFO of the modern world.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Nope, that's worthless. We should have taken from the small subset of the federal budget that is NASA, and given to the larger subset of the budget which is education, while ignoring the vast bottomless pits that money is thrown towards now.
Education isn't purely funded by the federal government either. Schools have the luxury of being funded by states and local government also.
How about this. In FY2010...
$18 billion went to NASA.
$150 billion went to education.
$685 billion went to the DoD.
The DoD plans on spending $382 billion on the F-35 program, so we'll have the bigger badder fighter aircraft than anyone. Since we already hold air superiority and that's not being challenged, that could easily be deemed an unnecessary expense.
So, why don't you show us where you would make budget cuts from, and not just preach from the "think of the children" handbook.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
no, I am pretty sure I started the topic with NASA as the first acronym, please feel free to prove me wrong
The resolution is 0.08 arcseconds. That translates to it being able to resolve 150m objects on the moon. You'd need a really big thumb I guess.