Raising Gaia, Europe’s Brainchild (El País, 4 July 2014)
Newspaper: El País Title: “Raising Gaia, Europe’s Brainchild” Webpage: elpais.com Publication date: 4 July 2014 Raising Gaia, Europe’s Brainchild By Xavier Luri Carrascoso, University of Barcelona Working on a space mission is a bit like raising children: it takes years, patience and some suffering, but it is also very rewarding. For me parenthood and the work on a space mission started around 2001, when my wife, Isabel, gave birth to our daughter Ana and the European Space Agency (ESA) approved the Gaia mission. Gaia’s main goal is to measure the distance to one billion...
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Gaia current status
Skymap movie This “skymap” figure illustrates the areas of the sky that Gaia has already observed during these roughly five months of Commissioning. The axes are Equatorial coordinates (right ascension and declination), wheras the color scale indicates the measurement density (as observations per square degree). Such density depends both on the sky in itself and on the “scanning law” followed by Gaia. As we can see, there are areas where the density is significantly higher than in others. This is due to the special scanning laws in which Gaia has been operated during...
read moreGaia mission at UB TV
TV show: UB television Title: “La missió Gaia” Emission date: 8 April 2014 Link to the video about the ESA Gaia mission and our involvement produced by UB television. This video is only available in spanish or catalan. Carregant vídeo…
read moreGaia is out there!
On the night from 6-7 March 2014, we could observe, from two telescopes, TJO and TFRM, located at Montsec Observatory, Gaia oriented perpendicular to the Sun (SAA=0 deg). We show here two animations from the two different telescopes: Video from TJO telescope: We show a video with over 700 images obtained with the TJO during almost 4 hours. Gaia can be seen as a star moving from right to left in the center of the image. The changes in brightness are related to differences in the exposure time, which ranges from 5 to 20 seconds. Animation from TFRM telescope: It...
read moreOur team got the City of Barcelona award 2013
Were are happy! Our GaiaUB group is the winner of the City of Barcelona award 2013 in the category “Experimental Sciences and Technology”. The jury (Josep Amat, David Jou, Víctor Puntes, David Serrat i Fernando Albericio) gave the award to our team because of “the contribution, from the beginning, to the concept and design of the Gaia mission, satellite succesfully launched on 19th desember 2013 to perform a 3D map of the Milky Way”. The team did important contributions to the simulations module, processing and management of the data obtained from the satellite, and...
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