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Two laser diodes from eagleyard Photonics - based in Berlin Adlershof - are working on board at European Space Agency’s billion-star surveyor Gaia. Their single frequency laser diodes DFB-852 in a 14-pin butterfly housing are responsible to keep the two telescopes in the right position to achieve Gaia's mission to create the most accurate 3-D map yet of the Milky Way.
Launched 1000 days ago, Gaia started its scientific work in July 2014. Whereas the necessary fully qualified laser diodes provided by eagleyard have been shipped to the end-customer to be integrated in their system back in 2010. The first catalogue of more than a billion stars from ESA's Gaia satellite has now been published as a taster of the richer catalogue to come in the near future. This first release is based on data collected during its first 14 months of scanning the sky, up to September 2015.
On its way to assembling the most detailed 3D map ever made of our Milky Way galaxy, Gaia has pinned down the precise position on the sky and the brightness of 1142 million stars. It also features the distances and the motions across the sky for more than two million stars.
