[by Stereoscopy News]

In 2013, ESA will launch Gaia, the most powerfull stereoscopic camera ever build to the L2 Lagrange point (a million-and-a-half kilometres from Earth) where it will stay taking pictures for at least 5 years. Gaia will catalogue a thousand million stars, producing 10,000 times more data than the previous Hipparcos mission.

The on-board gigapixel stereoscopic cameras were not designed with hairdressers in mind. However, they will have the capacity of measuring the diameter of a human hair at 1000 km!

The European Space Agency (ESA) has announced the completion of the cameras that’s to be used in Gaia: a billion-pixel mosaic comprising 106 individual CCDs in a 0.5×1 meter array.

Although Gaia’s transmitter is weak, it will be able to maintain the transmission at an 5 Mbps data rate from a distance of 1.5 million km. ESA’s most powerful ground stations, the 35 m-diameter radio dishes in Cebreros, Spain, and New Norcia, Australia, will intercept the faint signal. Gaia will always point away from the Sun.

After launch, it will unfold a ‘skirt’ that consists of a dozen separate panels. These will deploy into a roughly circular disc, just over 10 m in diameter that performs two functions: sunshade, which will permanently shade the telescopes in the payload module and allow their temperatures to drop to –100°C. The other function is to generate power for the spacecraft, so its surface will be partially covered with solar panels to generate electricity.

See the original post here: http://stereoscopynews.com/hotnews/history/digital/1706-the-ultimate-stereoscopic-camera.html

Find more info on Gaia here: http://sci.esa.int/science-e/www/area/index.cfm?fareaid=26