Into the unknown

This is a bit of old news, but a few posts on Facebook piqued my interest about the past and future of space exploration.

This is the first one, from Elise Andrew's "I Fucking Love Science."

The fact that this image exists shows two things, both of which are a little depressing: 1, people legitimately do not know the answer, and 2, people take advantage of the technology we have without thinking about how it came to be. The more we know about space, the more we understand about everything else, and the necessities that arise outside of our atmosphere have led to some pretty important products down here, including emergency and medical equipment. 

The second post was a glimmer of hope. Considering NASA's funding was annihilated, it's nice to see that the European Space Agency has their act together with their Gaia mission. In the footsteps of Hipparcos (High Precision Parallax Collecting Satellite and a play on the Greek astronomer) in 1989, Gaia set out last month to create a comprehensive, three dimensional map of the Milky Way. The current goal is to track the precise locations and motions of 1% of the stars in our galaxy, which may not sound impressive until you remember that the Milky Way alone has 100 billion stars.

From its orbit about 1.5 million miles outside Earth's orbit around the sun, Gaia will be able to observe its one billion stars without eclipses. Because it'll observe each data point about 70 times, it'll be able to track brightness differences as well as spot any new bodies, such as planets, asteroids, or brown dwarfs. When the mission is over in December 2018, Gaia's data will be combined into "the largest stellar catalog ever made," according to the ESA.

Field trip to L2, anyone?