Gaia

The Gaia Mission

ESA's web site for the Gaia scientific community
ESA's Gaia Mission Home Page

Gaia (launch expected Spring 2012) will measure the positions, distances, space motions, and many physical characteristics of about one billion stars in our Galaxy and beyond. Gaia will provide the detailed 3-D distributions and space motions of all these stars, complete to 20th magnitude. The measurement precision, reaching a few millionths of a second of arc, will be unprecedented. This will allow our Galaxy to be mapped, for the first time, in three dimensions. Ten million stars will be measured with a distance accuracy of better than 1 percent and a 150 million to better than 10 percent. Compared to Hipparcos, Gaia will improve parallax and proper-motion accuracy by almost a 100 times and the number of stars observed 10 000 times. In addition it measures radial velocities and spectrophotometry for all the sources. Gaia will survey a vast population of solar system bodies (major planets, natural satellites, comets, and asteroids, including several thousand near-Earth objects) and extragalactic objects (half a million quasars and thousands of supernovas). In addressing all these fields, Gaia covers a significant part of modern astrophysics .

Mission Main Scientific Objectives:

  • Reconstruct the History of the Milky Way.
  • Detect extrasolar planets and brown dwarfs .
  • Discover new Solar System Objects.
  • Supernovae observations
  • Testing Einstein's General Relativity.

Preparing ESA's Gaia mission for launch and operations requires the dedicated effort of several teams. ESA, with the support of the prime contractor, EADS Astrium, will design, build and test the satellite and payload. ESA will also launch and operate the satellite. Scientists from ESA Member States will develop the procedures and capabilities for the acquisition and analysis of data, and will produce the final catalogue. The resulting data from Gaia will be available to the ESA scientific community.


ASDC contributes to the mission:

  • DPAC collaboration

    The nature of the Gaia mission leads to the acquisition of an enormous quantity of complex, extremely precise data, representing the multiple observations of a billion diverse objects. The Gaia data challenge (processing raw satellite telemetry into valuable science products) is therefore a huge task in terms of expertise, effort and dedicated computing power. A large pan-European team of expert scientists and software developers known as DPAC (Data Processing and Analysis Consortium) is responsible for the processing of Gaia's data with the final objective of producing the Gaia Catalogue. Drawing its membership from 23 countries, the consortium brings together skills and expertise from across the continent, reflecting the international nature and cooperative spirit of ESA itself. The Gaia ASDC team is developing part of the software that will process GAIA data.


  • Catalogue

    The final Gaia Catalogue will contain the precise astrometric, photometric and spectroscopic details of about one billion of stars. Moreover Gaia will observe 107 Galaxies, 5*106 Quasars, 105 Supernovae, 106 new asteroids and 50000 new planetary systems. This huge amount of data will require more than 1 Petabyte of storage, corresponding to 250000 DVDs or 50000 Blu-Ray disks. ASDC will establish and maintain a mirror data site of the Gaia catalogue, moreover the Gaia ASDC team will develop data mining tools to support the scientific community in the exploitation of the Gaia catalogue.



 

 

 

 

 
Science goals of the Gaia mission (ESA)
Gaia@ASDC HELPDESK