Ambitious space telescope project Gaia shows Europe's nations can co-operate to address the universal questions
Stand back a bit – back from the Ukraine, Europe or Russia, a million miles from Earth, and even further from the sun. In a lonely orbit at a stable gravitational point in the cold and the dark, there is a newly launched space telescope called Gaia. It was designed and built by the European Space Agency, and launched from French Guiana on a Russian Soyuz-Fregat rocket, and its name is an acronym for Global Astrometric Interferometer for Astrophysics. The apparent reference to the Greek earth-mother goddess is accidental.
Gaia is the most ambitious attempt yet to understand the Milky Way galaxy of which Earth, its companion planets and its parent star are just trifling scraps. This galaxy is home to at least 100bn stars and is only one of at least 200bn galaxies in the visible universe. Gaia's challenge is to measure the speed and position of one billion stars by observing each of them about 70 times over the next five years. It will do this with two telescopes and the largest digital camera ever flown in space, and it will work to unprecedented accuracies. Its instruments could resolve the thickness of a human hair at a distance of 1,000km, and detect objects 400,000 times fainter than the naked eye could ever see.
Since it is 30,000 light years to the centre of the galaxy, this precision will vary with distance, but Gaia should be able to track the nearest stars in their courses to accuracies of a thousandth of a percentage point.
Its 40m observations a day will keep a consortium of 400 scientists busy for a decade. At the end of the experiment, humans will have an accurate map of at least one part of the galaxy, and a better idea of the composition and arrangement of the rest of the vast spiral of stars that provides a home for the only known instance of life anywhere in the universe. Gaia isn't the only great European adventure to unfold this year. The Earth observation satellite Sentinel-1 will soon monitor shipping lanes for polar ice during the winter night. Its radar will penetrate thick cloud to warn of catastrophic rainfall. It will detect oil spills at sea and forest destruction on land: the aim is to deliver warnings of flood, ice and fire within an hour.
Meanwhile, almost 700m kilometres from Earth, a spacecraft called Rosetta is heading for a rendezvous with a comet, to touch down on its frosty surface and join it on its journey towards the sun, in a bid to understand more about the workings of the solar system. Like Gaia, like Sentinel, Rosetta is the climax of decades of meticulous partnership. The bigger picture is that Europe's nations and people can co-operate, with remarkable unity and precision, to address the universal questions. The paradox is that it seems to work only for universal questions.
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