Wow – didn’t think I’d be in tears today, but this message sent home from Gaia as it was shut down forever today hits hard 😭

What you’re seeing is a map of the 106 CCD detectors that Gaia used to measure the positions of billions of stars in the Milky Way for the past 11 years 🛰️✨

They were turned off in a special sequence … 😕

#SpaceScience #Astronomy #Science

@markmccaughrean @bert_hubert why was it shut down? For technical reasons or financial reasons?

@jmovs @bert_hubert It ran out of propellant – it had a finite lifetime from the beginning, as it used micropropulsion to keep it rotating very precisely according to on-board atomic clocks. The tanks are now empty.

So this is a case of a spacecraft operations ending by design – but there is still so much more to come from the mission.

@markmccaughrean @jmovs @bert_hubert Honestly, I'm just relieved it's not being shut down for being woke or some such idiocy.
@mike @jmovs @bert_hubert Err, it’s a fully European mission, so we run our programmes on a rational basis.
@markmccaughrean @mike @bert_hubert hahahahahaha, what a nice humble brag 🧑‍🍳 💋

@jmovs @markmccaughrean @mike @bert_hubert

Data for at least 5 years till the release of the big catalogue 2030

@herr_filmkorn @jmovs @mike @bert_hubert Of course all the data are now in hand, by definition, but there are two major releases still planned once they’ve been fully assimilated into the massive processing system & calibrated. DR4 probably by the end of 2026 & DR5 in 2030.

The longer time baselines yield more precision & out to larger distances, plus much else. Despite amazing results already, the best Gaia science is definitely yet to come.

@markmccaughrean @jmovs @bert_hubert Relieved to hear it!

I genuinely would not have believed HALF of what's happening in the States if I'd been told even six months ago.

@mike @jmovs @bert_hubert I agree completely, even if they weren’t exactly hiding their agenda. The fact that many people voted for it & many others didn’t believe it could be so bad, well, that’s the true horror.
@markmccaughrean @jmovs @bert_hubert I think not only about the millions of people who are suffering right now with things like healthcare and education being destroyed — but also people who spent their careers slowly and painfully advancing vaccine science or climate mitigation or racial justice or international relations — only to see all of it deliberately smashed up by rich boys with nothing better to do.
@markmccaughrean @mike @jmovs @bert_hubert Well, as Germans we are somehow used to it. We also had a guy who laid out the atrocities he planed precisely in a book, but everybody was like: "Nah, he doesn't mean that"! So, unfortunately I'm not surprised that much.

@mike @markmccaughrean @jmovs @bert_hubert Sadly, I would have, and did. My mother was an historian, and I'm a student of history, as well as the last half century or so of modern media. Sadly, this was all not only predictable, but predicted. But yes, it was so unbelievable to most people that we were unable to persuade people to do what was necessary to prevent it.

The most important lesson of history is that anything that has ever happened anywhere can happen any time anywhere else.

@markmccaughrean @mike @jmovs @bert_hubert That is so good to know!! And keep up the good work!
@markmccaughrean amazing Storytelling. Goodbye Gaia
.

@markmccaughrean @pluralistic My condolences — may its memory be a blessing — it had a good life and did amazing work! I’ve been at more than one spacecraft funeral and I know saying that last, remote goodbye is always hard. I’ll never forget watching that final signal spike from Cassini as it tumbled into Saturn, or the stories shared as the MER team said goodbye to Spirit. Even that old xkcd comic was enough to send many team members into tears.

I hope you will have a good wake for your old and dear friend.❤️🛰️

Martin Vermeer FCD (@martinvermeer@fediscience.org)

@TheJen@beige.party There are so many stories like this out there. Hipparcos (High precision parallax collecting satellite) was an astrometric mission aiming to get annual parallaxes (i.e., inverse distances) of stars further out from the Sun than ground based telescopes can. One colleague who had worked for years on the data processing software, watched the launch in Kourou. And then - the apogee motor failed. My colleague went through a real process of mourning for the impending mission loss... /1

FediScience.org
@cyberlyra @markmccaughrean @pluralistic Yeah, Spirit... a f-ing *robot*, and Randall managed to suspend our disbelief like pressing a button. Make that up if you can

@martinvermeer @markmccaughrean @pluralistic Ha! To the team that designed and built it, then operated it for years, "babysat" it in the clean room, sent it off to Mars, and then sat in countless meetings day after day looking through its "eyes" out at the surface of another planet, caring for it through dust storms and cheering for it with each discovery, it was much more than "a f-ing robot."

So much more that I wrote a whole f-ing book about it ;) :

https://bookshop.org/p/books/seeing-like-a-rover-how-robots-teams-and-images-craft-knowledge-of-mars-janet-vertesi/6799972

@cyberlyra @martinvermeer @pluralistic Randall also did a brilliant job with a live xkcd stream during the landing of Philae on Comet 67P in 2014.

But then arguably we at ESA did one of the finest ever jobs of anthropomorphising spacecraft & connecting them emotionally with the cartoons & stories about Rosetta & Philae – they still have the power to make me cry.

https://youtu.be/HD2zrF3I_II?feature=shared

The amazing adventures of Rosetta and Philae

YouTube
@markmccaughrean Reading your post made me remember a documentary about the Cassini mission. Seeing the scientists say goodbye to their probe was so emotional.🥲
@markmccaughrean poor buddy. I hope it has a successor and is not just wiping out all of that tracking for good
@markmccaughrean What a beautiful and thoughtful way to say goodbye.

@markmccaughrean It's hard to see something so important, so impactful, just be turned off. That said, it's done truly amazing work, and everyone involved should be deeply proud of what's been accomplished.

There's so much we have yet to learn, and projects like this really give hope that humanity can learn more, be better, grow, even in crazy times.

@markmccaughrean
OK, that is just cool. nobody should think that science people don't have an artistic side. Scientist do art we just use different tools.

@markmccaughrean ooff, makes me sad when Space Probes die.

Voyager is going to be a heartbreaker

Will Gaia be hanging around in L1 for posterity or something?

@Lazarou

Voyager is the Keith Richards of satellites 🛰️ 🦾

@markmccaughrean

@Lazarou It was at L2, on the “dark side”
of Earth, but no, to avoid possible problems with active missions at L2 like JWST and the future PLATO & Ariel missions from ESA, Gaia was pushed off L2 today into an Earth-trailing solar orbit. It will get farther & father from Earth until Earth catches it up again in 2039 (at a safe distance).

@markmccaughrean Such amazing science!! Thank you, Gaia!

Every solar system small body project I'm involved in uses Gaia data for astrometric calibration, just one of the many science measurements made better by Gaia!

@markmccaughrean I was 11-12 when it launched. It was the first satellite mission I followed closely. I still have fond memories of the news of its arrival at L2, and that issue with some ice deposits shortly after arriving there.

And then Gaia's first release came in what? 2015-2016? Billions of stars ! How awesome!

bye, now, Gaia. We'll miss you dearly, but thanks for your service, spinning and spinning and spinning again in the void of space to catch glimpses of all these light dots.

@markmccaughrean oh, that's nice. Sad, too, but nice.

Gaia has a special place in my heart. 20+ years ago I worked with a small group that submitted a proposal for the data management side of the mission. It wasn't selected, but I still have fond memories of that work. Every time I read news from the mission I perk up a little.

@mem Sorry to hear that you didn’t win the competition back then, but I’m happy that you still feel a connection 👍
@markmccaughrean Bye Gaia and thanks for all the fish ❤️
@fiepfiepfiep There were many Adams-related sentiments shared today 🙂👍
@markmccaughrean We can't hear it anymore, but it's still somewhere there. It's like when we lose contact with friends or family but deep in our hearts we're happy because we know they are living their lives somewhere. And sure, they are always in our hearts.
Hugs,
@markmccaughrean it’s hard not to anthropomorphize these scientific spacecraft, embodying our hopes for the future and scientific dreams of discovery, not unlike our human progeny. This had me sobbing at my desk. Thanks for sharing.

@econoprof I’m sorry / glad to hear that 🙂 Many of the Gaia team spoke about their spacecraft this way today.

It may seem a little cheesy & exploitative even sometimes, but I fully agree with you on the power of anthropomorphisation. Indeed, my amazing science outreach team at ESA worked with some brilliant artists to come up with perhaps one of the most effective & emotional examples for the mission of Rosetta & Philae a decade ago. It still tugs at the heartstrings:

https://youtu.be/HD2zrF3I_II?feature=shared

The amazing adventures of Rosetta and Philae

YouTube
@econoprof That film is a combination of all the individual movies made during their mission & the same drawings were used alongside they spacecraft when spoke on social media in the first person, back in the day when Twitter was a better place.
@markmccaughrean okay, sniffles there at the intro, indeed! That I will watch in full on the big screen this weekend then share with all the little cousins. Thanks for this.
It’s a shame we are inundated by deciders who lost or never had that sense of wonder.
@markmccaughrean
Another question is why not having engineered a tank refill for this humongously precious and expensive tool ? Why not engineering a tank refill and a reboot right now ?

@franebleu Because it’s 1.5 million km away at the Sun-Earth L2 point (or was until today), important to keep the Sun & Earth on the same side of its huge sunshield, just like JWST.

No human has ever been further than about 1/4 that distance from Earth & a fully robotic servicing mission would likely cost as much as Gaia, which was never designed to be serviced anyway.

So a nice idea, but unfortunately completely impractical. Plus Gaia has already lasted twice as long as planned 👍

@markmccaughrean
Very clear, thanks ! 🙏

@markmccaughrean

Can you tell me more about the science Tm bool?

@rexbron The main ESA webpages for Gaia are a good start, the choice depending a bit on your starting point knowledge:

https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Gaia

https://www.cosmos.esa.int/web/gaia

Wikipedia has a pretty good collection of information too:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia_(spacecraft)

Gaia