ESA's 'Billion-Pixel Array' is the Biggest Digital Camera Ever Built for Space

By Clay Dillow Posted 07.06.2011 at 10:51 am 7 Comments

Gaia's Eyes Gaia will carry 106 charge coupled devices (CCDs), advanced versions of chips within standard digital cameras. Here technicians assemble them on their support structure. Astrium

The biggest, most sensitive digital camera ever constructed for a space mission has been built by the European Space Agency, and it makes your Leica look pretty lame by comparison. The Galaxy-mapping Gaia mission’s “billion-pixel array” has been cobbled together from 106 charge coupled devices (CCDs), and the result is some super high-resolution capability. When Gaia opens its eyes in 2013, it will be able to spot stars a million times fainter than the ones humans can see on the clearest night.

In case you were curious, the naked human eye can see several thousand stars on a nice clear night--roughly 2,500 are visible at any given time from any given place on Earth, clouds and light pollution notwithstanding. Gaia aims to map a full billion stars just within our own Milky Way galaxy (nevermind the distant quasars and intergalactic light it will also log).

Over five years, the mission will chart the spectral characteristics, positions, and brightness of these stellar bodies to give astronomers a clearer picture of the Milky Way’s formation and composition, as well as the way it is evolving (fun fact: those billion stars are less than one percent of the total stars in our galaxy).

How? Gaia packs 106 CCDs that make up the “billion-pixel array,” 102 of which will do the actual stargazing while four others maintain the image quality of each of the two telescopes that feed the stereo images to the sensors as well as the critical 106.5-degree angle between the two ‘scopes. The mission also has a fine vantage point picked out: the Earth-Sun L2 Lagrange point some 900,000-plus miles from Earth opposite the sun.

[ESA]

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7 Comments

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Kherzhul

07/06/11 at 11:06 am

You know what'd be cool?
A sort of space probe (like the Voyagers) that'd have enough cameras to cover everything around it, like the Google Streetview, but in space.

We could have 360° views from given positions in our solar system.

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antaro

07/06/11 at 11:47 am

So how big is the file size and how long will it take to download?

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JediMindset

07/06/11 at 3:12 pm

incredible. i bet one file would be like 100 tbs.

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turdfurgussen

07/06/11 at 5:40 pm

In uncompressed bitmap form with 32 bits per pixel, it should be about 4 GB per picture. 24 bpp: 3 GB per picture. I imagine the CCDs they're using for this array are about 10 megapixels apiece (10 megapixel x 102 = 1 gigapixel). So the file from the telescope would only be about 100 times bigger than your typical 10mp RAW file.

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zechio

07/06/11 at 5:42 pm

At max, 32 bit per pixel with no compression you're looking at 4 gigs per shot. ( 32 x 1 billion = 32 billion bits. 32/8 = 4 billion Bytes )

However, when you consider an 8 megapixel camera takes a picture that is only around 2 megs or less ( and thats 1/125 of this camera ), with a pretty heavy loss compression it could be more like 125-250 megs. This of course would corrupt their data, so it's likely they would use some type of lossless compression. It would get the size down a fair bit, but not as much.

Being that space is mostly just black and white would help a lot in lossless compression, so it is hard to say just how much it would help. One Hubble picture is 6,200x6,200 which is about 38.5 mega-pixels. This image( www.spacetelescope.org/images/heic0406a/ ) is 110 megs. At this ratio, a 1 Giga-Pixel image would be a little over 2.8 gigs.

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shutterpod

07/06/11 at 7:59 pm

Did I read that correctly? This camera is to be positioned in space in the same location as the JWST(if THAT gets launched, I mean, referring to the news today...)?

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johnt007871

07/07/11 at 11:37 am

@shutterpod

Must be a misprint. Our government said it isn't possible in today's economic times to launch there. Surely they know.

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