Posted on 07/08/2011 2:40:12 AM PDT by LibWhacker
In 2013, the European Space Agency will launch the Gaia spacecraft. Its billion-pixel imaging sensor will be among the largest digital cameras ever to exist, and over the course of its mission, it's estimated that Gaia will detect 15,000 new alien planets.
Gaia's gigantic sensor is comprised of 106 separate CCD detectors, mosaiced together to form a monster camera over three feet wide. The resulting imaging system is so powerful that it will be able to precisely measure the width of a hair from over 600 miles away, and from here on Earth, it could spot a dime on the moon.
Hair measuring and dime spotting are not what Gaia is going to be spending her time at, of course. The spacecraft will spend five years creating a three dimensional map of our entire galaxy, including, oh, about a thousand million stars or so. Along the way, it's expected to detect (on average) 250 quasars, 30 brown dwarfs, 10 stars with planets orbiting them, and 10 stars exploding in other galaxies - every day. It's numbers like this that make you realize just how stupendously gigantic the universe really is, and we'll start seeing brand new pics of the place back from Gaia sometime in 2013.
ESA Gaia, via NetworkWorld
The near earth objects should be watched as well IMO. This rock is due IMO.
...”it’s estimated that Gaia will detect 15,000 new alien planets.”
Alien planets? There are no “alien” planets. They might be independent of our solar system but that wouldn’t make them alien to the Milky Way or to the universe.
10 planets a day?
Only if they all orbit in 0.5 days. One orbit to detect, one to confirm.
A billion-pixel camera...
Gonna take a whoppin big SD card for that thing!
Better check the specials at Newegg.. :-)
Your minkey. Do you have a lee-zance for your minkey?
Poignant pic. The aliens, if intelligent, would most likely view us as such.
Or they might view us as a hot dog.
Or they might be like chess prodigies- brilliant at one thing (interstellar spaceflight, in this case) and flummoxed by the simplest of things that we find trivial.
We only have one data point upon which to base our estimates.
A hive-minded culture might waste its time looking everywhere for the giant Human grand-ant that controls everything, while thugs in the hood are boosting the hubcaps off of their landing vehicles and rolling them in alley-ways.
Guess we find out when we find out. :-)
Too bad we won’t be able to afford the electricity to plug our Ipods in to see the pics...
Zat is not my minkey.
Agreed on all points.
I’ll be interested to see what sort of exoplanetary imagery comes out of this camera, though. I hope they take some warm up shots of the Apollo 11 landing site. I’ve seen some low-res ones recently of the various Apollo sites- the A14 site shows an astronaut ‘footpath’ between the lander’s lower stage and the deployed science package.
There's a sad irony here- in Conservatives being so often sneered at by Libs for being 'intellectually incurious'.
There's a sad irony here- in Conservatives being so often sneered at by Libs for being 'intellectually incurious'.
Exactly. Beyond irony though I've always thought of the Left's sickness being exclusionary self-obsession and fear of objective consciousness. A Dark Ages kind of thing. We call it Lefego at the Institute.
Johnny Suntrade
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