The observatorio Gaia of the European Space Agency (ESA) photographed the telescopio James Webba device that reached its final destination in December 2021 and whose telescope observation point is almost a million miles from Earth.
On February 18, 2022, the two spacecraft were 1 million kilometers apart, with Gaia’s view towards Webb’s huge parasol. Of course, the telescope appears as a tiny and faint flash of light.
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A few weeks before Webb’s arrival at L2, experts on Gaia Uli Bastian from the University of Heidelberg (Germany) and Francois Mignard of the Nice Observatory (France) realized that during continuous scanning of Gaia from all the skyits new neighbor on L2 should occasionally cross Gaia’s fields, reports THIS.
Gaia is not designed to take actual photos of celestial objects. Instead, it collects very precise measurements of your positions, movements, distances and colors. Every six hours, Gaia’s sky mapper scans a narrow swath of 360 degrees around the entire celestial sphere.
You know, now the observatory has a companion spacecraft at L2, and together they will uncover the mysteries of our galaxy.
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