August 9, 2005, Chelmsford, England--e2v technologies has been awarded the flight-phase contract to supply the European Space Agency (ESA) with CCD imaging sensors for the primary scientific instrument on its GAIA space mission. This contract is worth 14.3 million Euros (US $11.6 million) over the coming three years and is the culmination of a successful two-year contract for the design and development of a custom CCD image sensor for Gaia.
The development phase contract was placed in 2003 and was valued at 2 million Euros (US $1.6 million); there are further options to supply up to another 10 million Euros (US $8.1 million) of flight grade sensors for this program. Known for its large CCD sensors, e2v technologies is a specialist developer and manufacturer of high-technology electronic components and subsystems.
Anticipated for launch in 2011, Gaia aims to map our galaxy, the Milky Way, by logging the 1 billion stars and more than 100,000 objects in our solar system, creating the largest, most accurate 3-D map of the galaxy to date. The sky will be continually scanned and it is anticipated that as many as 10,000 planets around other stars may be discovered.
The Gaia project will involve the manufacture in significant volumes of some of the highest-performance large-area CCD image sensors ever produced. These will be manufactured at e2v's headquarters in Chelmsford. The CCD image sensors will ultimately be assembled by a subcontractor selected by ESA into the largest focal plane ever flown in space.
David Southwood, Director of Science at ESA, said, "Thanks to e2v technologies, ESA has been able to implement a mission that would have not been possible a few years ago. Ten years ago we saw the Gaia concept being born. Now, we are setting the contracts to make Gaia a reality."
e2v's CCD image sensors have been supplied to a variety of high-profile space projects over many years, including NASA's Hubble space telescope and Kepler planet-finding mission, ESA's ENVISAT and Rosetta programs, and the Chinese LAMOST (Large sky-Area Multi-Object Spectroscopic Telescope) project.