Gaia basic angle monitoring system

The Gaia mission will create an extraordinarily precise three-dimensional map of more than one billion stars in our Galaxy. The Gaia spacecraft2, built by EADS Astrium, is part of ESA's Cosmic Visionprogramme and scheduled for launch in 2013. Gaia measures the position, distance and motion of stars with an accuracy of 24 micro-arcsec using two telescopes at a fixed mutual angle of 106.5°, named the ‘Basic Angle’, at an operational temperature of 100 K. This accuracy requires ultra-high stability at cryogenic conditions, which can only be achieved by using Silicon Carbidefor both the optical bench and the telescopes. TNO has developed, built and space qualified the Silicon carbideBasic Angle Monitoring (BAM) on-board metrology system3 for this mission, measuring the relative motion of Gaia’s telescopes with accuracies in the range of 0.5 micro-arcsec. This is achieved by a system of two laser interferometers able to detect Optical Path Differences (OPD) as small as 1.5 picometer rms. Following a general introduction on Gaia and the use of Silicon Carbideas base material this paper addresses the specific challenges towards the cryogenic application of the Gaia BAM including design, integration and verification/qualification by testing.