First Gaia Intermediate Data Release to come in Summer 2016

From 16 to 20 November 2015, about 200 members of the Gaia Data Processing and Analysis Consortium (DPAC) met in Leiden, The Netherlands, in a plenary meeting to review the current status of preparations for future catalogue releases from ESA’s billion star surveyor mission.

Moreover, the contents of the first Gaia Intermediate Data Release have been announced during this meeting. The intended release has three elements:

1. Sky positions and broad-band magnitudes of objects with single-star and good astrometric behaviour.
2. Photometric data of selected RR Lyrae and Cepheids from the high-cadence Ecliptic Pole Scanning law period, and
3. Astrometric parameters (positions, parallaxes, and proper motions) based on the Tycho-Gaia Astrometric Solution (TGAS; A&A paper) for some 2 million objects in common between the Tycho-2 catalogue and Gaia.

The production run for these three elements is underway and is expected to be completed in early 2016. See the scheduled releases here!