Mission
The mission was proposed in October 1993 by Lennart Lindegren (Lund University, Sweden) and Michael Perryman (European Space Agency) in response to a call for proposals for ESA's Horizon Plus long-term scientific programme. It was adopted by ESA's Science Programme Committee as cornerstone mission number 6 on 13 October 2000, and the B2 phase of the project was authorized on 9 February 2006, with EADS Astrium taking responsibility for the hardware. The launch is planned for August 2013. The total cost of the mission is around 650 million euros, including the manufacture, launch and ground operations.
The overall data volume that will be retrieved from the spacecraft during the 5-year mission assuming a nominal compressed data rate of 1 Mbit/s is approximately 60 TB, amounting to about 200 TB of usable uncompressed data on the ground. The responsibility of the data processing, partly funded by ESA, has been entrusted to a European consortium (the Data Processing and Analysis Consortium, or DPAC) which has been selected after its proposal to the ESA Announcement of Opportunity released in November 2006. DPAC's funding is provided by the participating countries and has been secured until the production of the Gaia final Catalogue scheduled for 2020.
Gaia will send back data for about eight hours every day at about 5 Mbit/s. ESA's two most sensitive ground stations, the 35 m diameter radio dishes in Cebreros, Spain, and New Norcia, Australia, will receive the data.
Read more about this topic: Gaia (spacecraft)
Famous quotes containing the word mission:
“The mission of men there seems to be, like so many busy demons, to drive the forest all out of the country, from every solitary beaver swamp and mountain-side, as soon as possible.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“It is the mission of the twentieth century to elucidate the irrational.”
—Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1907–1961)
“We can come up with a working definition of life, which is what we did for the Viking mission to Mars. We said we could think in terms of a large molecule made up of carbon compounds that can replicate, or make copies of itself, and metabolize food and energy. So that’s the thought: macrocolecule, metabolism, replication.”
—Cyril Ponnamperuma (b. 1923)