Related papers: Gaia on-board metrology: basic angle and best focu…
Space observatories for gravitational radiation such as LISA are equipped with dedicated on-board instrumentation capable of measuring magnetic fields with low-noise conditions at millihertz frequencies. The reason is that the core…
The inference of stellar parameters (such as radius and mass) through asteroseismic forward modelling depends on the number, accuracy, and precision of seismic and atmospheric constraints. ESA's Gaia space mission is providing precise…
GAIA is an astrometric satellite which has been approved by the European Space Agency for launch in about 2010. It will measure the angles between objects in fields that are separated on the sky by about a radian. Data will stream…
The power of micro-arcsecond ($\mu$as) astrometry is about to be unleashed. ESA's Gaia mission, now headed towards the end of the first year of routine science operations, will soon fulfil its promise for revolutionary science in countless…
We describe the development and implementation of a light-weight, fully autonomous 2-axis pointing and stabilization system designed for balloon-borne astronomical payloads. The system is developed using off-the-shelf components such as…
Since July 2014, the ESA Gaia mission has been surveying the entire sky down to magnitude 20.7 in the visible. In addition to the millions of stars, thousands of Solar System Objects (SSOs) are observed daily. By comparing their positions…
We employ differential astrometric methods to establish a small field reference frame stable at the micro-arcsecond ($\mu$as) level on short timescales using high-cadence simulated observations taken by Gaia in February 2017 of a bright…
SOFIA is an airborne, gyroscopically stabilized 2.5m infrared telescope, mounted to a spherical bearing. Unlike its predecessors, SOFIA will work in absolute coordinates, despite its continually changing position and attitude. In order to…
Context. Gaia is an ESA cornerstone mission launched on 19 December 2013 aiming to obtain the most complete and precise 3D map of our Galaxy by observing more than one billion sources. This paper is part of a series of documents explaining…
Optimal estimation of signal amplitude, background level, and photocentre location is crucial to the combined extraction of astrometric and photometric information from focal plane images, and in particular from the one-dimensional…
The Gaia mission is reviewed together with the expected contents of the final catalogue. It is then argued that the ultimate goal of Galactic structure studies with Gaia astrometry should be to build a dynamical model of our galaxy which is…
Secular extragalactic parallax caused by the solar system's velocity relative to the cosmic microwave background rest frame may be observable as a dipole proper motion field with amplitude $78~\mu$as yr$^{-1}$ Mpc. Nearby galaxies also…
Gaia is the cornerstone mission of the European Space Agency. From late 2013 it will start collecting superb astrometric, photometric and spectroscopic data for around a billion of stars of our Galaxy. While surveying the whole sky down to…
Large, deep surveys must typically rely on multiband photometry rather than spectroscopy for determining the astrophysical properties (APs) of stars. Yet designing an optimal photometric system for a wide range of objects is complex,…
(Abridged) Gaia aims to make a 3-dimensional map of 1,000 million stars in our Milky Way to unravel its kinematical, dynamical, and chemical structure and evolution. Gaia's on-board detection software discriminates stars from spurious…
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…
Gaia mission will offer an exceptional opportunity to perform variability studies. The data homogeneity, its optimised photometric systems, composed of 11 medium and 4-5 broad bands, the high photometric precision in G band of one milli-mag…
In the context of the ESA M5 (medium mission) call we proposed a new satellite mission, Theia, based on relative astrometry and extreme precision to study the motion of very faint objects in the Universe. Theia is primarily designed to…
The second Gaia data release (GDR2) provides precise five-parameter astrometric data (positions, proper motions and parallaxes) for an unprecedented amount of sources (more than $1.3$ billion, mostly stars). The use of this wealth of…
Accurate stellar masses are requested in order to improve our understanding of stellar interiors, but they are still rather rare. Fortunately, the forthcoming Gaia Mission will provide astrometric measurements permitting the derivation of…