IT WILL be the biggest selfie of all time. When the Gaia space telescope launches next week, it is set to map a billion stars in our galaxy with unprecedented accuracy – and fundamentally transform our understanding of the cosmos around us.
If all goes according to plan, the European Space Agency's bold mission will blast off from French Guiana on a Russian Soyuz rocket and travel 1.5 million kilometres into space. Far beyond the glow of Earth's atmosphere Gaia will hover in orbit around the sun and start to spin slowly, capturing every celestial object that falls within its gaze for the next five years. As well as charting 1 per cent of the stars in the Milky Way – around one billion of them – the telescope will l ocate planets around other suns, warn us of asteroids in our solar system and pinpoint hundreds of thousands ...
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