Related papers: The Gaia Mission, Binary Stars and Exoplanets
The Gaia satellite, planned for launch by the European Space Agency (ESA) in 2013, is the next generation astrometry mission following Hipparcos. While mapping the whole sky, the Gaia space mission is expected to discover thousands of Solar…
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…
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…
The ESA Gaia mission uses two telescopes to create the most ambitious survey of the Galaxy. The angle between them must be known with exquisite precision and accuracy. An interferometer: the Basic Angle Monitoring system measures its…
Gaia is an ESA cornerstone mission, which was successfully launched December 2013 and commenced operations in July 2014. Within the Gaia Data Processing and Analysis consortium, Coordination Unit 7 (CU7) is responsible for the variability…
The first data release from the Gaia mission contains accurate positions and magnitudes for more than a billion sources, and proper motions and parallaxes for the majority of the 2.5~million Hipparcos and Tycho-2 stars. We describe three…
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…
Stellar multiplicity is among the oldest and richest problems in astrophysics. Binary stars are a cornerstone of stellar mass and radius measurements that underpin modern stellar evolutionary models. Binaries are the progenitors of many of…
The GAIA space observatory was recently approved as Cornerstone 6 of ESA's science program, to be launched no later than mid-2012. It will provide a stereoscopic and kinematic census of about 10^9 stars throughout our Galaxy (and into the…
With Gaia in orbit since December 2013 it is time to look at the future of fundamental astrometry and a time frame of 50 years is needed in this matter. A space mission with Gaia-like astrometric performance is required, but not necessarily…
GAIA will provide a multi-colour photometric and astrometric census of some one billion compact sources, complete to 20th magnitude. In addition, spectra for radial velocities will be obtained for about 30 million stars brighter than V=17.…
The Hipparcos satellite was launched in 1989. It was the first, and remains to date the only, attempt at performing large-scale astrometric measurements from space. Hipparcos marked a fundamentally new approach to the field of astrometry,…
The search for extrasolar planets has developed rapidly and, today, more than 1700 planets have been found orbiting stars. Thanks to Gaia, we will collect high-accuracy astrometric orbits of thousands of new low-mass celestial objects, such…
Gaia is an astrometric mission that will be launched in spring 2013. There are many scientific outcomes from this mission and as far as our Solar System is concerned, the satellite will be able to map thousands of main belt asteroids (MBAs)…
The Gaia astrometric mission - the Hipparcos successor - is described in some detail, with its three instruments: the two (spectro)photometers (BP and RP) covering the range 330-1050 nm, the white light (G-band) imager dedicated to…
The Gaia satellite is a high-precision astrometry, photometry and spectroscopic ESA cornerstone mission, currently scheduled for launch in late 2011. Its primary science drivers are the composition, formation and evolution of the Galaxy.…
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…
Context: The space telescope Gaia is dedicated mainly to performing high-precision astrometry, but also spectroscopy and epoch photometry which can be used to study various types of photometric variability. One such variability type is…
The ESA Cornerstone Mission GAIA, to be launched prior to 2012 and with a nominal lifetime of 5 years, will improve the accuracy of Hipparcos astrometry by more than two orders of magnitude. GAIA high-precision global astrometric…
The Gaia space astrometry mission is measuring accurate distances and space motions of more than two billion stars throughout our Galaxy and beyond. This is a first look at how Gaia is contributing to fundamental physics, and in particular…