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Register a new userThe Gaia Mission and Significance
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F.Mignard
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I provide a summary of the ESA space astrometry mission Gaia regarding its main objectives and current status following the 2nd data release (Gaia DR2) in April 2018. The Gaia achievements in astrometry are assessed with a historical perspective by comparing the DR2 content to sky surveys or parallax searches over the last two centuries. One shows that Gaia sounds more like a big leap into a new world than an incremental progress in this field.
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Gaia is a very ambitious mission of the European Space Agency. At the heart of Gaia lie the measurements of the positions, distances, space motions, brightnesses and astrophysical parameters of stars, which represent fundamental pillars of modern astronomical knowledge. We provide a brief description of the Gaia mission with an emphasis on binary stars. In particular, we summarize results of simulations, which estimate the number of binary stars to be processed to several tens of millions. We also report on the catalogue release scenarios. In the current proposal, the first results for binary stars will be available in 2017 (for a launch in 2013).
On the 19th of December 2013, the Gaia spacecraft was successfully launched by a Soyuz rocket from French Guiana and started its amazing journey to map and characterise one billion celestial objects with its one billion pixel camera. In this presentation, we briefly review the general aims of the mission and describe what has happened since launch, including the Ecliptic Pole scanning mode. We also focus especially on binary stars, starting with some basic observational aspects, and then turning to the remarkable harvest that Gaia is expected to yield for these objects.
Gaia is a cornerstone mission in the science programme of the European Space Agency (ESA). The spacecraft construction was approved in 2006, following a study in which the original interferometric concept was changed to a direct-imaging approach. Both the spacecraft and the payload were built by European industry. The involvement of the scientific community focusses on data processing for which the international Gaia Data Processing and Analysis Consortium (DPAC) was selected in 2007. Gaia was launched on 19 December 2013 and arrived at its operating point, the second Lagrange point of the Sun-Earth-Moon system, a few weeks later. The commissioning of the spacecraft and payload was completed on 19 July 2014. The nominal five-year mission started with four weeks of special, ecliptic-pole scanning and subsequently transferred into full-sky scanning mode. We recall the scientific goals of Gaia and give a description of the as-built spacecraft that is currently (mid-2016) being operated to achieve these goals. We pay special attention to the payload module, the performance of which is closely related to the scientific performance of the mission. We provide a summary of the commissioning activities and findings, followed by a description of the routine operational mode. We summarise scientific performance estimates on the basis of in-orbit operations. Several intermediate Gaia data releases are planned and the data can be retrieved from the Gaia Archive, which is available through the Gaia home page at http://www.cosmos.esa.int/gaia.
In astronomy, we are witnessing an enormous increase in the number of source detections, precision, and diversity of measurements. Additionally, multi-epoch data is becoming the norm, making time-series analyses an important aspect of current astronomy. The Gaia mission is an outstanding example of a multi-epoch survey that provides measurements in a large diversity of domains, with its broad-band photometry; spectrophotometry in blue and red (used to derive astrophysical parameters); spectroscopy (employed to infer radial velocities, v sin(i), and other astrophysical parameters); and its extremely precise astrometry. Most of all that information is provided for sources covering the entire sky. Here, we present several properties related to the Gaia time series, such as the time sampling; the different types of measurements; the Gaia G, G BP and G RP-band photometry; and Gaia-inspired studies using the CORrelation-RAdial-VELocities data to assess the potential of the information on the radial velocity, the FWHM, and the contrast of the cross-correlation function. We also present techniques (which are used or are under development) that optimize the extraction of astrophysical information from the different instruments of Gaia, such as the principal component analysis and the multi-response regression. The detailed understanding of the behavior of the observed phenomena in the various measurement domains can lead to richer and more precise characterization of the Gaia data, including the definition of more informative attributes that serve as input to (our) machine-learning algorithms.
Gaia is the next astrometry mission of the European Space Agency (ESA), following up on the success of the Hipparcos mission. With a focal plane containing 106 CCD detectors, Gaia will survey the entire sky and repeatedly observe the brightest 1,000 million objects, down to 20th magnitude, during its 5-year lifetime. Gaias science data comprises absolute astrometry, broad-band photometry, and low-resolution spectro-photometry. Spectroscopic data with a resolving power of 11,500 will be obtained for the brightest 150 million sources, down to 17th magnitude. The thermo-mechanical stability of the spacecraft, combined with the selection of the L2 Lissajous point of the Sun-Earth/Moon system for operations, allows stellar parallaxes to be measured with standard errors less than 10 micro-arcsecond (muas) for stars brighter than 12th magnitude, 25 muas for stars at 15th magnitude, and 300 muas at magnitude 20. Photometric standard errors are in the milli-magnitude regime. The spectroscopic data allows the measurement of radial velocities with errors of 15 km/s at magnitude 17. Gaias primary science goal is to unravel the kinematical, dynamical, and chemical structure and evolution of the Milky Way. In addition, Gaias data will touch many other areas of science, e.g., stellar physics, solar-system bodies, fundamental physics, and exo-planets. The Gaia spacecraft is currently in the qualification and production phase. With a launch in 2013, the final catalogue is expected in 2021. The science community in Europe, organised in the Data Processing and Analysis Consortium (DPAC), is responsible for the processing of the data.
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