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In a uncommon double - whammy quad assault , theEuropean Space Agency ’s Gaia spacecraft was recently slam by a micrometeoroid and struck by a solar storm , leaving it ineffective to function properly . But the artificial satellite is now back to unremarkable operations after the near - ravage wallop , scientists say .
Gaia orbits at more than 932,000 nautical mile ( 1.5 million kilometers ) from Earth at what is known as the L2Lagrange Point , where the conflate gravitational personnel of our planet and the sunshine produce a static orbit . The spacecraft ’s goal is to create a 3D map of the individual stars in theMilky Way .
An illustration of the European Space Agency’s Gaia spacecraft mapping the Milky Way
But in April , ameteoroidsmaller than a grain of gumption strike Gaia and damaged the protective buckler surrounding its instrumentation . In the months since , sunlight sneaking through this tiny fissure has disrupted the ballistic capsule ’s detector , according to ESA . In May , for unidentified reason , another piece of electronics miscarry — part of the system that enable Gaia to formalise its detection of stars — ensue in thousands of false detections .
" Gaia typically sends over 25 gigabytes of data to Earth every mean solar day , but this amount would be much , much high if the space vehicle ’s onboard software did n’t reject false ace detections first , " Edmund Serpell , Gaia spacecraft surgical process engineer at the European Space Operations Centre , said in astatement . " Both late incidents cut off this physical process . As a resultant , the spacecraft began generating a immense bit of false detections that overwhelm our system . "
The 2d failure might have been due to the same burst of solar particle from the sun thattriggered widespread auroras around the globein May , consort to ESA .
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Though there is little the Gaia squad can do about the spacecraft ’s hardware , they were capable to patch its software to keep the spacecraft going , change the threshold at which Gaia class an object as a star . The craft , launched in 2013 , was originally design to expend six years in space but has make it for more than a decade .
Gaia has previously avail astronomersdetect the Milky Way ’s oldest stars , which were hold more than 12.5 billion year ago . The craft has also detecteddim companion to major starsanda binary star systemin which one star ’s disk eclipses another . data point from Gaia has even given scientist an estimate of when theMilky Waywill fuse with its neighbour , the Andromeda Galaxy — indicating the stupendous hit will occur4.5 billion years from now .
Gaia is anticipate to continue collecting data until theend of 2025 , when it will lead out of gas in its propulsion organization .
