Gaia
ESA's billion star surveyor
The mission
Gaia will create an extraordinarily precise three-dimensional map of more than a thousand million stars throughout our Milky Way galaxy and beyond, mapping their motions, luminosity, temperature and composition. This huge stellar census will provide the data needed to tackle an enormous range of important questions related to the origin, structure and evolutionary history of our galaxy.
Launch: 19 December 2013
Orbit: L2 Lagrangian point
Data release milestones:
Data Release 1: 14 September 2016
Data Release 2: 25 April 2018
Early Data Release 3: 3 December 2020
Next milestone:
Data Release 3: 13 June 2022
- 1 billion pixel camera
- 10 m sunshield
- 8 years in space
- 1800 million objects
Latest
Image
Science & Exploration
The density of stars from Gaia’s Early Data Release 3
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