Gaia
ESA's billion star surveyor
The mission
Gaia is creating 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 Lagrange point
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Upcoming data releases:
Data Release 4 (based on 66 months of data): not before mid 2026
Data Release 5 (based on all mission data) not before the end of 2030 -
Previous data release milestones:
Data Release 1: 14 September 2016
Data Release 2: 25 April 2018
Early Data Release 3: 3 December 2020
Data Release 3: 13 June 2022
Focused Product Release: 10 October 2023
- 1 billion pixel camera
- 10 m sunshield
- 1800 million objects
Latest
Image
Science & Exploration
The best Milky Way map, by Gaia
