Gaia, the European Space Agency’s billion-star surveyor, blasted off this morning on a Soyuz rocket from Europe’s spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana.
Gaia has been launched at 09:12 GMT on a five-year mission to map the stars of the Milky Way in three dimensions and discover previously unknown objects in the galaxy including planets orbiting other stars, nearby asteroids, and exploding stars. Scientists hope that the satellite may also yield clues about the nature of dark energy.
The mission is to accurately map the positions of a billion stars, about 1% of the stars in our galaxy.
