The Gaia satellite sits at the Kourou space base in French Guiana last week. The European Space Agency successfully launched the satellite today aboard a Russian-made rocket. It's mission is to produce the most accurate three-dimensional map of our part of the Milky Way and provide insight into the evolution of the galaxy.

BERLIN — The European Space Agency launched its star-surveying satellite Gaia into space today, hoping to produce the most accurate three-dimensional map of the Milky Way and to better understand the evolution of our galaxy.

The satellite was lifted into space from French Guiana aboard a Russian-made Soyuz rocket, the agency said.

Soon after the launch, Gaia unfurled its circular sun shield — a crucial moment in the mission.

The shield protects the spacecraft’s sensitive instruments from the rays of the sun while simultaneously collecting solar energy to power the spacecraft.

“Everything was super smooth,” said Paolo Ferri, head of mission operations at the Paris-based European Space Agency.

Gaia is now heading for a stable orbit around a point known as Lagrange 2 — some 930 million miles away on the opposite side of the Earth from the sun. Once it gets there next month, the satellite’s instruments will be switched on and it will follow what Ferri described as “a very peculiar pattern” designed to keep its back always turned to the sun.

Timo Prusti, ESA’s project scientist, likened the mission’s goal to the switch from two-dimensional movies to 3-D.

At the moment, he said scientists are working with a largely “flat” map of the galaxy.

Using its twin telescopes, Gaia will study the position, distance, movement, chemical composition and brightness of a billion stars in the galaxy, or roughly 1 percent of the Milky Way’s 100 billion stars.

The data will help scientists determine the Milky Way’s origin and evolution, according to Jos de Bruijne, deputy project scientist.

“The prime importance of this mission is to do galactic archaeology,” he said.

The project is the successor to ESA’s Hipparcos satellite, which was launched in 1989 and measured the position of 100,000 stars in the Milky Way.

Gaia, which is named after an ancient Greek deity, will go far beyond that. Scientists have compared its measuring accuracy to measuring the diameter of a human hair from 600 miles away.

ESA has dubbed Gaia the “ultimate discovery machine.”