Sky-scanning complete for Gaia

ESA’s Milky Way-mapper Gaia has completed the sky-scanning phase of its mission, racking up more than three trillion observations of about two billion stars and other objects over the last decade to revolutionise our view of our home galaxy and cosmic neighbourhood.

Launched on 19 December 2013, Gaia’s fuel tank is now approaching empty – it uses about a dozen grams of cold gas per day to keep it spinning with pinpoint precision: this amounts to 55 kg of cold gas for 15 300 spacecraft ‘pirouettes’.

Gaia’s catalogue is ever-growing, containing data on stars and other cosmic objects such as asteroids in our Solar System, exoplanets, binary stars and other galaxies.

After the raw data are downlinked to Earth, ESA and the Gaia Data Processing and Analysis consortium prepare the data for scientific use, adding crucial information for their usage.

Since the publication of the first Gaia data in 2016 and counting up to early 2025, Gaia’s catalogue has been accessed more than 580 million times, resulting in the publication of over 13 000 scientific papers.

This is far from the end of the mission, two massive data releases are still to come.

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[Image Description: An infographic with the new artist impression of our Milky Way in the background, an artist impression of the Gaia space telescope in front of it, and numbers on the sky-scanning phase written in a circle in the foreground: 3 trillion observations, 2 billion stars & other objects observed, 938 million camera pixels on board, 15 300 spacecraft ‘pirouettes’, 55 kilogram cold nitrogen gas consumed, 3827 days in science operations, 50 000 hours ground station time used, 500 terabytes volume of data release 4 (5.5 years of observations), 142 terabytes downlinked data (compressed), 2.8 million commands sent to spacecraft, 13 000 refereed scientific publications so far, 580 million accesses of Gaia catalogue so far.]