Maxwell Technologies Inc. [NASDAQ: MXWL] has won a contract valued at approximately $3 million from Astrium’s United Kingdom-based satellite unit to supply single board computers (SBC) for the European Space Agency’s (ESA) “Gaia” astronomy mission. The goal of the mission is to survey more than a billion stars and other celestial bodies in order to trace the origin and evolution of the Milky Way Galaxy. Seven Maxwell SCS750 SBCs will process images and data gathered by the two-ton satellite’s camera 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for the duration of the five-year mission. The massive volume of data to be collected and the precision of the imaging instrumentation will enable scientists to create a three-dimensional map of the galaxy and study its formation with unprecedented detail and accuracy.
The satellite will be launched into an orbit at Lagrange point 2, which is 1.5 million kilometers (932,000 miles) into space on the “night side” of Earth so that it will be shielded from glare from the Earth, Sun and Moon that otherwise would interfere with image and data collection. The payload will include two telescopes and a camera capable of processing digital images from more than one hundred charge-coupled devices (CCDs) of 10 million pixels each—San Diego, California
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