Unravelling the origin and evolution of our galaxyBarcelona 10 Oct 2000 A group of researchers from the Institut d'Estudis Espacials de Catalunya (IEEC) and the Universitat de Barcelona (UB), the Grupo Mecanica del Vuelo company (GMV), and the Centre de Supercomputacio de Catalunya (CESCA), have been selected by the European Space Agency (ESA) to do the first scientific, technical and computing design of GAIA's database. The primary science goal of the GAIA mission is to clarify the origin and history of the Milky Way.
This mission will provide a stereoscopic, kinematic and photometric map of more than one billion stars throughout our Galaxy and throughout the Local Group. Furthermore, the project includes the detection and characterisation of tens of thousands of extra-solar planetary systems, a comprehensive survey of objects ranging from huge numbers of minor bodies in our Solar System, through galaxies in the nearby Universe, to half a million distant quasars. Last July, ESA gave the industrial contract to design and implement the GAIA's data base system to a group of researchers from UB and IEEC, to GMV company and to CESCA. This contract is a step forward to have a key position in this mission. As Jordi Torra, from UB and a GAIA's Instrument Working Group member, says "our project has got this contract in an open competition with other European projects, and now we must coordinate efforts to complete our objective".
This project is a part of the ESA's Technological Research Programme, which develops new technologies needed by the future missions. GAIA is an opportunity for researchers to work in an up-to-date project: massive database design, object oriented programming, remote access to information, etc. A determining factor for the group to obtain the contract has been to be composed of members of different fields. On the one hand, the GMV company has brought its professional group with a large experience in software engineering and, in particular, in database intensive systems, as well as in satellite control centres. On the other hand, the UB and the IEEC have a wide scientific knowledge and the experience gained with the creation of the GAIA's prototype and simulator, a project made in collaboration with CESCA. This simulator has allowed to artificially represent the amount of data that the satellite will send and to test the prototype with these data. The launch of GAIA's satellite will be not later than 2012. Immediately after insertion in its final orbit, GAIA will start taking measurements which will continue for a period of five years. Every one of the one thousand of million targets will be observed typically one hundred times. GAIA will detect within 20,000 and 30,000 extra-solar planets at a distance of 300-500 light years; this means to find 20 new planets per day of observation. In addition, more than 100,000 objects in our solar system (mostly asteroids), 50,000 brown dwarfs, around 100,000 supernovae and 10 millions of galaxies will be observed by GAIA. All the data will be reduced, managed and exploited through an intensive database (100 TB). A personal computer would need 300 years to reduce the data generated by GAIA, whereas a supercomputer will only require one year. GAIA was the Greek goddess of Earth worshipped as the universal mother who had created the Universe. More recently, her name was taken by James Lovelock for his theory of the interdependency between the Earth's atmosphere and biological organisms. Now, it is the name given to an ambitious project to go deeply into the knowledge of the structure, origin and evolution of our Galaxy.
Web site: http://astro.estec.esa.nl/GAIA.
Teresa Via |
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