The largest digital camera that ever has been built for a space mission is put together from 106 CCDs, advanced versions of chips within standard digital cameras. The resulting billion-pixel array will serve as the super-sensitive eye of ESA's Galaxy-mapping Gaia mission. While the naked human eye can see several thousand stars on a clear night, Gaia will map a billion stars on its journey within our own Milky Way Galaxy and its neighbors over the course of its five-year mission that will commence in 2013...
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