A 拢400 million spacecraft is getting ready to weather an incoming meteoroid storm next week. The Gaia telescope is currently mapping the Milky Way from a point in deep space, which is set to be showered with grains of comet dust on 8 October.
Mission operators at the European Space Agency say they will command the spacecraft to rotate and shield itself to avoid any damage.
The manoeuvre comes as a result of a study led by Auriane Egal of the University of Western Ontario, Canada. The team say that Gaia is due to encounter a stream of 鈥�顿谤补肠辞苍颈诲鈥�聽meteoroids 鈥� essentially flecks of dust 鈥� previously deposited in space by the comet 21P/Giacobini-Zinner.
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These Draconids will approach Gaia from an angle above its protective sunshield, so ESA has been forced to take action.
鈥淭here is a direct path into the telescope,鈥� says Gaia spacecraft operations manager David Milligan. As such, they plan to rotate the craft to put the sunshield in the direction of the Draconids, he says.
The ESA team hope the better shielding from Gaia鈥檚 enormous, circular sunshield will protect the spacecraft from any potential damage from the meteoroids. Egal says they will be travelling at a speed of roughly 20 kilometres per second when they hit.
Egal鈥檚 simulations predict that most particles hitting Gaia will be larger than 1 millimetre in size, but it is possible that only smaller meteoroids hit, or even none at all, she says.
If there are impacts, Gaia may be able to sense them by registering the miniscule jolt they give the spacecraft, which could tell us more about these kinds of meteor showers.
鈥淭his is important because the Draconids is an irregular and hard-to-predict shower, which is a potential threat for satellites,鈥� says Egal.
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