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Gaia factsheet
Fast facts
Name: Gaia
Mission: To determine the position and velocity of a billion stars, creating the largest and most precise 3D map of the Milky Way
Launch date: 2013
Mission end: nominal mission end after 5 years (2018)
Launch vehicle: Soyuz-Fregat
Launch mass: 2030 kg, including 710 kg of payload, a 920 kg service module and 400 kg of propellant.
Dimensions: 10 m across, with solar array deployed
Orbit: Lissajous-type orbit around L2
Instruments: Astro (2 identical telescopes and imaging system); BP/RP (Blue and Red Photometers) and RVS (Radial-Velocity Spectrometer)
Partnerships: Gaia is a fully European mission designed, built and operated by ESA.
Primary mission objectives:
- Measure the positions and velocity of approximately one billion stars in our Galaxy
- Determine their brightness, temperature, composition and motion through space
- Create a three-dimensional map of the Galaxy
Additional discoveries expected:
-hundreds of thousands of asteroids and comets within our Solar System
-seven thousand planets beyond our Solar System
-tens of thousands of ‘failed’ stars, called brown dwarfs
-twenty thousand exploding stars, called supernovae
-hundreds of thousands of distant active galaxies, called quasars.
Gaia mission facts
- Gaia will observe one billion stars about 70 times each over five years. That’s an average of 40 million observations a day!
- One billion stars amounts to about 1 percent of the stars populating the Milky Way.
- Of the one billion stars Gaia will observe, 99% have never had their distances measured accurately.
- Gaia will carry the largest digital camera into space with nearly one billion pixels. By comparison, smart phone cameras have around 10 million pixels.
- Gaia will detect celestial objects that are a million times fainter than the unaided human eye can see.
- For objects 4000 times fainter than the naked eye limit, Gaia will measure their positions to an accuracy of 24 microarcseconds, comparable to measuring the diameter of a human hair at a distance of 1000 km. Gaia’s predecessor, Hipparcos, could have measured the diameter of a human hair at a distance of 20 km.
- The nearest stars will have their distances measured to the extraordinary accuracy of 0.001%. Even stars near the Galactic Centre, some 30 000 light-years away, will have their distances measured to within an accuracy of 20%.
- The Gaia Data Processing and Analysis Consortium (DPAC) consists of more than 400 individuals who will contribute some 2000 person-years of effort to the Gaia data processing exercise.
- By the end of the mission, the data archive will exceed 1 Petabyte (1 million Gigabytes), equivalent to about 200 000 DVDs worth of data.
Last update: 18 June 2013
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