ESA Science & Technology - Gaia
A 500-day global observation campaign spearheaded more than three years ago by ESA’s galaxy-mapping powerhouse Gaia has provided unprecedented insights into the binary system of stars that caused an unusual brightening of an even more distant star.
ESA Science & Technology - Gaia mission - European Space Agency
ESA's Gaia mission has one main goal, to map the Milky Way more extensively and with greater precision than any other mission to date. Using astrometry, the science of measuring the distance and motion of stars, Gaia will map a billion stars over a 5 year period to produce a comprehensive catalogue of measurements that will impact on most areas ...
ESA Science & Technology - Spacecraft - European Space Agency
Sep 1, 2019 · The Gaia spacecraft is comprised of three major functional modules: The Payload Module containing the optical instrument and all electronics required to manage its operation and process its raw data.
ESA Science & Technology - Gaia creates richest star map of our …
Apr 25, 2018 · ESA's Gaia mission has produced the richest star catalogue to date, including high-precision measurements of nearly 1.7 billion stars and revealing previously unseen details of our home Galaxy.
ESA Science & Technology - Fact Sheet - European Space Agency
Gaia was adopted within the scientific programme of the European Space Agency (ESA) in October 2000. The mission aims to: measure the positions of about 1 billion stars both in our Galaxy and other members of the Local Group, with an accuracy down to 24 microarcseconds; perform spectral and photometric measurements of all objects
ESA Science & Technology - Summary - European Space Agency
Sep 1, 2019 · By constructing a detailed map of the stars, Gaia will provide a crucial tool to study the formation of our Galaxy, the Milky Way. While surveying the sky, Gaia is bound to make many other discoveries.
ESA Science & Technology - Gaia's Hertzsprung-Russell diagram
Apr 25, 2018 · This Hertzsprung-Russell diagram, obtained by a selection of stars in Gaia's second release catalogue, is the most detailed to date made by mapping stars over the entire sky, containing roughly a hundred times more stars than the one obtained using data from ESA's Hipparcos mission, the predecessor of Gaia, in the 1990s.
ESA Science & Technology - Multimedia Gallery
Gaia is an ambitious mission to chart a three-dimensional map of our Galaxy, the Milky Way, in the process revealing the composition, formation and evolution of the Galaxy. Gaia will provide unprecedented positional and radial velocity measurements with the accuracies needed to produce a stereoscopic and kinematic census of about one billion ...
ESA Science & Technology - Gaia turns its eyes to asteroid hunting
Jan 24, 2017 · Gaia is an ESA mission to survey one billion stars in our Galaxy and local galactic neighbourhood in order to build the most precise 3D map of the Milky Way and answer questions about its origin and evolution.
ESA Science & Technology - Gaia: 'Go' for science - European …
Jul 29, 2014 · Following extensive in-orbit commissioning and several unexpected challenges, ESA's billion-star surveyor, Gaia, is now ready to begin its science mission.