ESA–D. Ducros, 2013
A £400 million spacecraft is getting ready to weather an incoming meteoroid storm next week. The Gaia telescope is currently mapping the Milky Way from a point in deep space, which is set to be showered with grains of comet dust on 8 October.
Mission operators at the European Space Agency say they will command the spacecraft to rotate and shield itself to avoid any damage.
The manoeuvre comes as a result of a study led by Auriane Egal of the University of Western Ontario, Canada. The team say that …