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 … 😕
@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 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 @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.
Mark McCaughrean
Justin Scholz
Mike Taylor 🦕
WesDym