Gaia ESA packs pixels camera one billion maps all milky way in 3D

 What is the image on your camera sensor? Five Megapixels? Eight? 16? It does not really matter because the European Space Agency is about to make you feel very inadequate. It was just placed on a 1 pixel billion ' (that is, 1000 megapixels) imaging device called Gaia, that map the road milky way in 3D.

A billion pixels is actually a little bit a euphemism. Gaia surface combines 106 averages by credit card, charge coupled devices (CCD), each the width of a human hair. The CCD sensors, which are actually "miniature" cameras in their own right, feature 4,500 pixels in the direction "along scanning ' and 1 966 pixels"across to the scanning", providing a total of approximately 8,847,000 pixels per CCD." Multiply that by 160 and you have a giant CCD consisting of 1 billion $ 415 million, thousand 520 pixels. Zoinks!

This, unsurprisingly, ever-so-slightly longer to see that bottle of milk you glasses used to rock at the primary school. The European Space Agency takes into account that the resolution is so high that even if Gaia were mounted on the surface of the Earth "he could measure the thumbnails of a person on the Moon". If you were to stand in front of him, he might see in your soul. Try that with your Nokia N8.

Fortunately, the European Space Agency has not created Gaia simply for manicure of the astronauts is on the rise scratch (see what we have done it?). Its rather ambitious goal is to create the three-dimensional chart more and more precise in our Galaxy ever seen, what it will do so by mapping the stars of thousand million, each as a pinpoint of light capturing up to 70 times over a period of five years.

The European Space Agency plans to launch Gaia sometime in 2013 on the Soyuz Fregat Launcher.