Related papers: Gaia: Organisation and challenges for the data pro…
Launch of the Gaia space observatory started a new era in astrometry when the accuracy of star coordinates increased by thousands of times. Significant improvement of accuracy was also expected for the coordinates of the Solar system…
PRAIA - Package for the Reduction of Astronomical Images Automatically - is a suite of astrometric and photometric tasks designed to cope with huge amounts of heterogeneous observations with fast processing, no human intervention, minimum…
In its all-sky survey, Gaia will monitor astrometrically hundreds of thousands of main-sequence stars within $\approx200$ pc, looking for the presence of giant planetary companions within a few AUs from their host stars. Indeed, Gaia…
The third data release by the Gaia mission of the European Space (DR3) is the first release to provide the community with a large sample of observations for more than 150 thousand Solar System objects, including asteroids and natural…
The body of photometric and astrometric data on stars in the Galaxy has been growing very fast in recent years (Hipparcos/Tycho, OGLE-3, 2-Mass, DENIS, UCAC2, SDSS, RAVE, Pan Starrs, Hermes, ...) and in two years ESA will launch the Gaia…
A new mission about twenty years after Gaia with similar astrometric performance would be important for all branches of astronomy. The two missions together would, e.g., give much more accurate motions of the common objects due to the large…
The ESA space astrometry mission Gaia, planned to be launched in 2013, has been designed to make angular measurements on a global scale with micro-arcsecond accuracy. A key component of the data processing for Gaia is the astrometric core…
The third Gaia data release is published in two stages. The early part, Gaia EDR3, gives very precise astrometric and photometric properties for nearly two billion sources together with seven million radial velocities from Gaia DR2. The…
The LISA mission is an international collaboration between ESA, its member states, and NASA, for the detection of gravitational waves from space. It was adopted in January 2024 and is scheduled for launch in the mid-2030's. It will be a…
During the Hipparcos mission in September 1992, I presented a concept for using direct imaging on CCDs in scanning mode in a new and very powerful astrometric satellite, Roemer. The Roemer concept with larger aperture telescopes for higher…
High-precision astrometry well beyond the capacities of Gaia will provide a unique way to achieve astrophysical breakthroughs, in particular on the nature of dark matter, and a complete survey of nearby habitable exoplanets. In this…
During some thirty years, 1980-2010, technical studies of optical interferometry from instruments in space were pursued as promising for higher spatial resolution and for higher astrometric accuracy. Nulling interferometry was studied for…
The Gaia all-sky astrometric survey is challenged by several issues affecting the spacecraft stability. Amongst them, we find the focus evolution, straylight and basic angle variations Contrary to pre-launch expectations, the image quality…
The GBOT group is in charge of the Ground Based Optical Tracking of the Gaia satellite. In concrete terms, since the launch of Gaia, our task is to take every night, using ground based medium-class telescopes, short sequences of $10$ or…
A complicated and ambitious space mission like Gaia needs a careful monitoring and evaluation of the functioning of all components of the satellite. This has to be performed on different time scales, by different methods, and on different…
ELSA stands for the ambitious goal of `European Leadership in Space Astrometry'. In this closing contribution I will examine how the ELSA network has advanced this goal. I also look ahead to the time when the Gaia data will be published and…
In its all-sky survey, Gaia will monitor astrometrically and photometrically millions of main-sequence stars with sufficient sensitivity to brown dwarf companions within a few AUs from their host stars and to transiting brown dwarfs on very…
The Gaia second data release contains high-accuracy astrometric measurements of thousands of solar system bodies. These measurements raise the possibility of determining asteroid masses by modeling scattering events between massive objects…
In this contribution I provide an overview of the the European Space Agency's Gaia mission just ahead of its launch scheduled for November 2013.
Since its launch in 2013, the Gaia space telescope has provided precise measurements of the positions and magnitudes of over 1 billion stars. This has enabled extensive searches for stellar and sub-stellar companions through astrometric and…