What’s Gaia?

Gaia is an ambitious mission of the European Space Agency (ESA) to chart a three-dimensional map of our Galaxy, the Milky Way, in the process of revealing the composition, formation and evolution of the Galaxy.

How long will the mission last?

Initially, Gaia was a five-year mission started on December 19, 2013, from Europe’s Spaceport in the French Guiana. However, due to the availability of fuel and good performance, it has been extended several times, now up to December 2025, subject to a mid-term review in 2022.

Why Gaia?

Gaia focuses on one of the most difficult yet deeply fundamental challenges in modern astronomy: the creation of an extraordinarily precise three-dimensional map of about one and a half billion stars throughout our Galaxy and beyond. The satellite launched in December 2013 observes each of its one and a half billion sources about 80 times, resulting in a record of the brightness and position of each source over time.

This massive stellar census provides the basic observational data to tackle an enormous range of important problems related to the origin, structure, and evolutionary history of our Galaxy.

The Gaia mission delivers an astronomical catalogue and data archive of unprecedented scope, accuracy, and completeness.

Where can I check the data from Gaia?

The first Gaia Data Release (Gaia DR1) was launched on September 14th, 2016, based on Gaia’s first 14 months of observations. Following the first release, new datasets are published based on longer time intervals and with additional data products. The second data release (Gaia DR2) was in April 2018, based on 22 months of observations. The third data release is based on 34 months of observations and split in two parts: an early data release (Gaia-EDR3) published in December 2020, and the full data release (Gaia-DR3), scheduled for the first half of 2022.

Find further and detailed data on the ESA’s cosmos website!

Learn more about the Gaia mission on this video!