A space astrometry mission and cornerstone of the ESA (European Space Agency), the Gaia Universe Surveyor aims to provide a census and three-dimensional kinematic mapping of our galaxy, and beyond.
Gaia
An ambitious project, Gaia is bringing in an unprecedented harvest of data, and will break a number of records at the end of its five-year mission: a billion pixels in space, to observe a billion stars, and measure positions with a very high precision of one billionth of a degree (µarcsec), and ultimately collect a million billion bytes of data (PetaByte). In addition to stars and extragalactic sources, Gaia regularly and continuously observes around 350,000 asteroids and other Solar System bodies up to magnitude V ≈ 20.5, i.e. half the known population. The data set is processed, reduced and analyzed by a European consortium of researchers and engineers, DPAC. The astrometric, photometric and spectroscopic data from these bodies are expected to lead to major advances in our knowledge of the Solar System, or to tests of fundamental physics (mass determinations, detection of the Yarkovsky effect, age of collisional families, predictions of stellar occultations, tests of gravitation...).
