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 … 😕
@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 👍
Mark McCaughrean
franebleu