Hipparcos - Space Telescope Preparing Data Catalogue
Over ten years ago, the ESA Hipparcos satellite set out on a mission that pinpointed a high-precision accuracy of more than one hundred thousand stars, with more than one million stars.
The Hipparcos satellite was questioned about errors in the calculated data that was gathered by the satellite. An ESA satellite, it was their first space mission for measuring positions, distances, motions, brightness, and the colors of stars for astrometry. Considered to be the bedrock of the Universal study since ancient times, it has affected the field of astronomy with its set of stellar catalogs—The Hipparcos and the Tycho—first published by ESA in 1997.
Just released, “Hipparcos-The New Reduction of the Raw Data”, BBC News states that the new catalog will allow astronomers to probe more deeply into the stars and galaxies, along with their unique properties. It is considered by many to be “the most accurate catalog of the distances to more than 100,000 stars” due to the efforts of a man by the name of Dr. Floor Van Leeuwen, a Cambridge astronomer. He has spent the past ten years or so going over and recalculating the Hipparcos’ data from their satellite data, which were originally collected in the 1990s with many found errors in the results.
The Hipparco mission was launched on August 8, 1989, from the launch vehicle Ariane-4. With a highly elliptical 10-hour orbit, it was definitely considered a pioneering European mission. It successfully observed and gathered data from the celestial sphere for about three and a half years, before ceasing its mission in 1993. At that time, observational calculations were generated to form the Hipparcos Catalog of 118,218 stars charted with the highest precision. An auxiliary star mapper, the original Tycho Catalog, charted 1,058,332 stars with unprecedented accuracy with its Tycho 2 catalog bringing that number to 2,539,913 stars in the year 2000.
Even though there were errors in the Hipparcos satellite data, ESA states there were also achievements which were part of its success today with the updated catalogs:
* Predict the impacts of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 on Jupiter
* Identified stars that will pass close to the Sun
* Established the distances of stars possessing planets
* Discovered that the Milky Way is changing shape
* Identified a group of stars that invaded our Galaxy when it was young
* Altered the cosmic distance scale, making the Universe bigger and younger
* Confirmed Einstein’s prediction of the effect of gravity on starlight
This entry was posted on Monday, September 24th, 2007 at 6:32 am and is filed under Space Agency News, Technical Concerns. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
