Europe's 'discovery machine' soars to map the Milky Way

The sharp-sighted Gaia observatory, carrying the largest camera ever flown in space, rocketed into a predawn sky from French Guiana on Thursday to survey a billion stars and reveal the structure of the Milky Way in finer detail than any mission before. The ambitious European project, in the works since the early 1990s, promises to collar countless cosmic wonders, ranging from intrinsically bright distant quasars and exploding stars to comparatively dim alien planets, brown dwarf stars and asteroids closer to home. More

(Source: SpaceFlight Now - Dec 19)