Once we hear the name GAIA, our memory automatically zooms back to the Whoopi Goldberg-voiced Mother Earth from Captain Planet. This is not that GAIA, however it does ought to do with planets. Back on the turn of the millennium, the European Space Agency devised an ambitious mission to map 1000000000 stars in our Milky Way galaxy — in 3D (insert Joey Lawrence ‘whoa!’). To do that, it enlisted UK-based e2v Technologies and built an important digicam made out of 106 snugly-fit charge coupled devices — the biggest ever for an area program. These bank card-shaped, human hair-thick slabs of silicon carbide act like tiny galactic eyes, each storing incoming light as a single pixel. Not sufficiently impressed? Then consider this: the stellar cam is so all-seeing, “it can measure the thumbnails of someone at the Moon” — from Earth. Yeah. Set to launch at the Soyuz-Fregat sometime this year, the celestial surveyor will make its five-year home inside the Earth-Sun L2 Lagrange point, beaming its outerspace discoveries to radio dishes in Spain and Australia — and infrequently peeping for your neighbor’s window.
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