The European Space Agency (ESA) has launched its Gaia satellite, which is tasked with producing the most precise map of the Milky Way Galaxy to date.

According to BBC News, the spacecraft took off at 9:12 GMT and will complete its mission by gathering data on at least a billion stars. Gaia will track the stars' exact position and the distance in between one another.

Gaia will also be on the lookout for previously undetected objects, like new planets and asteroids. In development for 20 years, Gaia is equipped with a one-billion-pixel camera and three other sensory instruments.

The satellite will examine its targets for several years, profiling them to ensure the absolute most precision possible.

"This angle is equivalent to the size of a euro coin on the Moon as seen from Earth," said Alvaro Gimenez, ESA director of science.

Part of each star's profile will include brightness, temperature, composition and even the velocity at which it is traveling toward or away from Earth.

"It will allow us, for the first time ever, to walk through the Milky Way - to say where everything is, to say what everything is. It is truly a transformative mission," said Gerry Gilmore, of Cambridge University, U.K.

In about six years, Gaia will compile one Petabyte, or one million Gigabytes, which is the equivalent to 200,000 DVDs.

"To think that you see individual scientific papers coming out now that talk about just a single object - a single star or exoplanet. And very soon, because of Gaia, we will have information on a billion objects. What will the scientific literature look like then?" said Princeton University's Michael Perryman, former Gaia ESA project scientist. "Of course, there will be big statistical projects you can tackle with this data, but it is clear the scale of Gaia means this information is not going to be superseded for a very long time."