In a rare double space attack, the European Space Agency’s Gaia spacecraft was recently struck by a micrometeor and hit by a solar storm, leaving it unable to function properly. But the satellite is now back to routine operations after the near-destructive impact, scientists say.
Gaia orbits more than 932,000 miles (1.5 million kilometers) from Earth in what is known as L2 Lagrange point, where the combined gravitational forces of our planet and the sun create a stable orbit. The goal of the spacecraft is to create a 3D map of individual stars in the Milky Way.
But in April, a meteoroid smaller than a grain of sand struck Gaia and damaged the protective shield surrounding her instruments. In the months since then, sunlight sneaking through this tiny crack has disrupted the spacecraft’s sensors, according to ESA. In May, for unknown reasons, another piece of electronics failed – part of the system that enables Gaia to validate star detection – resulting in thousands of false detections.
“Gaia typically sends over 25 gigabytes of data to Earth every day, but that amount would be much, much higher if the software on board the spacecraft didn’t first eliminate false star detections,” Edmund Serpell, operations engineer of the Gaia spacecraft in European Space Operations. The center, it is said in a STATEMENT. “The last two incidents interrupted this process. As a result, the spacecraft began generating a large number of false detections that overwhelmed our systems.”
The second failure may have been caused by the same blast of solar particles from the sun caused widespread auroras around the globe in May, according to ESA.
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Although the Gaia team can do little about the spacecraft’s hardware, they were able to adjust its software to keep the spacecraft moving by changing the threshold at which Gaia classifies an object as a star. The spacecraft, launched in 2013, was originally designed to spend six years in space, but has survived for more than a decade.
Gaia has helped astronomers before discover the oldest stars of the Milky Way, which were born more than 12.5 billion years ago. Craftsmanship has also revealed faint companions of large stars AND a binary star system in which the disk of one star eclipses another. Data from Gaia has even given scientists an estimate of when the Milky Way will merge with its neighbor, the Andromeda Galaxy – indicating that the colossal collision will occur. 4.5 billion years from now.
Gaia is expected to continue collecting data until the end of 2025when it will run out of gas in its propulsion system.
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