Related papers: Astrometry for Dynamics
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.
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…
GAIA is a short-listed candidate for the ESA Cornerstone mission C5, meeting the ESA Survey Committee requirement for an observatory mission, dedicated to astrometry, providing 10 micro-arcsecond accuracy at 15th magnitude. The GAIA mission…
Astrometry is one of the oldest branches of astronomy which measures the position, the proper motion and parallax of celestial objects. Following the Hipparcos and Gaia missions that have measured several billions of them using global…
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…
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…
Gaia is ESA's ambitious space astrometry mission the main objective of which is to astrometrically and spectro-photometrically map 1000 Million celestial objects (mostly in our galaxy) with unprecedented accuracy. The announcement of…
On January 15 2025, the Gaia mission completed the collection of the astrometric, photometric, and spectroscopic data for about 2.5 billion celestial sources, from the solar system to the Milky Way to the distant universe. Work is ongoing…
The class of transiting cold Jupiters, orbiting at $\gtrsim0.5-1.0$ au, is to-date underpopulated. Probing their atmospheric composition and physical characteristics is particularly valuable, as it allows for direct comparisons with the…
Context. White dwarfs can be used to study the structure and evolution of the Galaxy by analysing their luminosity function and initial mass function. Among them, the very cool white dwarfs provide the information for the early ages of each…
ESA and NASA are studying projects having a tremendous return on variable star research. Other national space agencies are also studying or developing projects of smaller costs but with impressive returns. The projects range from global…
Gaia is a revolutionary space mission developed by ESA and is delivering 5 parameter astrometry, photometry and radial velocities over the whole sky with astrometric accuracies down to a few tens of micro-arcseconds. A weakness of Gaia is…
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…
In this paper, we first summarize the results of a large-scale double-blind tests campaign carried out for the realistic estimation of the Gaia potential in detecting and measuring planetary systems. Then, we put the identified capabilities…
The sheer size of high-accuracy, multi-band photometry, spectroscopy, astrometry and seismic data that space missions like Kepler, Gaia, PLATO, TESS, JWST and ground-based facilities under development such as MOONS, WEAVE and the LSST will…
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…
The nominal duration of Euclid's main mission is six years, but current best estimates indicate that the observatory has sufficient propellant to operate for up to ~14 years in total. In this work, we advocate dedicating six of these ~8…
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 satellite will survey the entire celestial sphere down to 20th magnitude, obtaining astrometry, photometry, and low resolution spectrophotometry on one billion astronomical sources, plus radial velocities for over one hundred…
Astrometric microlensing is a unique tool to measure stellar masses. It allows us to determine the mass of the lensing star with an accuracy of a few per cent. In this paper, we update, extend, and refine our predictions of…