European Space Agency, Spain
European Space Agency will map the Milky Way with Caché
In 2012, the European Space Agency (ESA) will launch an ambitious mission to chart a three-dimensional map of the Milky Way. Because an enormous amount of data will need to be quickly stored and analyzed, ESA has selected InterSystems Caché as the advanced database technology to support the scientific processing of the Gaia mission.
Gaia will spend five years monitoring a billion stars in our galaxy. It will collect
data on each of them about 70 times, precisely measuring their positions,
distances, movements, and changes in brightness. It is expected that the Gaia
mission will discover hundreds of thousands of new celestial objects, such as
extra-solar planets and failed stars called brown dwarfs. Within our own solar
system, Gaia should also observe hundreds of thousands of asteroids.
All of this adds up to an astronomical amount of data to be collected and analyzed. A key element of the Gaia satellite is the Astrometric Global Iterative Solution (AGIS), which iteratively refines the spatial accuracy of all the Gaia measurements. In the course of its operation, AGIS must be able to insert up to 50 billion Java objects into a database within 7 days. Caché is the only database ESA found that could provide the necessary performance and scalability, with only moderate hardware requirements.
“With CACHÉ, we obtain considerably superior performance and
scalability than is possible with other databases.”
--William O’Mullane
Scientific Operations Manager of the Gaia mission
European Space Agency
The key is advanced technology, found only in Caché, which allows Java objects to be inserted directly into the multidimensional structures used by the Caché database engine. Says William O’Mullane, Scientific Operations Manager of the Gaia Mission for ESA, “With Caché, we obtain considerably superior performance and scalability than is possible with other databases.”
The information collected by Gaia will allow scientists to learn a great deal about the origin, structure, and evolutionary history of our galaxy.
