While it was getting ready to power down its Gaia spacecraft, the European Space Agency encountered some unusual resistance. The spacecraft, which has been creating a highly detailed, three-dimensional map of more than a billion stars throughout the Milky Way and beyond, proved surprisingly difficult to kill. "Switching off a spacecraft at the end of its mission sounds like a simple enough job," said Gaia spacecraft operator Tiago Nogueira in an ESA statement. "But spacecraft really don’t want to be switched off." That's mainly because scientists intentionally made Gaia incredibly resilient to its hostile environment. "Gaia was designed to withstand […]