Gaia’s first year of scientific observations

Source: ESA Gaia

Last Friday, August 21, ESA’s billion-star surveyor, Gaia, completed its first year of science observations in its main survey mode.

After launch on December 19, 2013, Gaia started its routine scientific operations on July 25, 2014, providing an invaluable database for Gaia’s initial calibration. From this point, on August 21, 2014, Gaia already started its main survey operation to come up with enormous public catalogues of the positions, distances, motions and other properties of more than a billion stars.

Timo Prusti, Gaia project scientist at ESA, explains that “we are just a year away from Gaia’s first scheduled data release, an intermediate catalogue planned for the summer of 2016”.

Since the start of its routine phase, the satellite recorded 272 billion positional or astrometric measurements, 54.4 billion brightness data points, and 5.4 billion spectra.

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