ESA to Launch Spacecraft Equipped with a Billion-Pixel Camera

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The European Space Agency (ESA) plans to launch in 2013 its Gaia spacecraft equipped with a billion-pixel imaging sensor. This will be the world's largest digital camera that will help identify 15,000 new alien planets.

It would be interesting to note that the huge sensor is composed of 106 separate CCD detectors, collected together in order to create a gigantic camera that is more than 3 feet wide.

The system is powerful enough to be able to detect a hair located 600 miles away and accurately measure its width. From Earth the camera can detect a small coin on the moon. But these are not the real objectives of the device.

Gaia will spend time (5 years to be precise) producing a 3D map of our galaxy with about a thousand million stars. In just one day the camera will be able to identify about 250 quasars, 30 brown dwarfs, 10 stars that have planets orbiting them, and 10 exploding stars found in other galaxies.

The first images from Gaia will arrive in sometime in 2013.

[KizoneC]

daghana kaha og ma diskobrehan ani nice nice info sir

[BeerBreeze]

syarog dili maklaro ang flag sa moon ani...

[rodsky]

syarog dili maklaro ang flag sa moon ani...

It would be nearly impossible to photograph a flag on the moon with a spacecraft NOT in lunar orbit.

-RODION

[THE SKULLS]

Why Rods?
Is it because of space dust? Moon's layers of atmosphere and clouds?

[treize]

syarog dili maklaro ang flag sa moon ani...

I don't think those flags that Apollo crews left were still alive/in good shape..


"It wasn't the intention for the flag material itself to last. It was just to be there during the, the event - the landing and departing from the moon. We didn't have a requirement that the flag, the U.S. flag, had to withstand all the environments for eons," Platoff says.

Made from nylon just like the ones at a dime store, though ordered off the shelf from a government supply catalogue, Annie Platoff's theory is they are probably darkened and maybe more than a bit tattered.

"I would guess, over time, 40 years, the combination of sun-rot and micro-meteor impact is probably devastating. I mean it's not a pretty picture to paint. The only way you're going to test these theories is to go back to the Moon and look at the flag," Platoff says.

What happened to the American flags on the moon? - CBS News

[THE SKULLS]

and let's see the remaining debris of the apollo ?

[treize]

tua ra.............

[rodsky]

Why Rods?
Is it because of space dust? Moon's layers of atmosphere and clouds?

Because the speed of the moon's rotation about its axis, coupled with the spacecraft's own orbital motion (solar or earth orbit) would make it impossible to lock onto a particular object on the surface of the moon less than 20km/sq in area unless the camera was orbiting the moon itself.

And no, the moon does not have an atmosphere and it doesn't have clouds.

and let's see the remaining debris of the apollo ?

Already done by LROC and Kaguya (both in lunar orbit):
http://www.lroc.asu.edu/news/index.p...ing-Sites.html
http://www.universetoday.com/15579/j...g-site-images/

-RODION