Gaia (spacecraft)

Common card · No. 209087

Gaia is a retired space observatory of the European Space Agency (ESA) that was launched in 2013 and operated until March 2025. The spacecraft was designed for astrometry: measuring the positions, distances and motions of stars with unprecedented precision, and the positions of exoplanets by measuring attributes about the stars they orbit such as their apparent magnitude and colour. As of 2026, the mission data processing continues, aiming to construct the largest and most precise 3D space catalogue ever made, totalling approximately 1 billion astronomical objects, mainly stars, but also planets, comets, asteroids and quasars, among others. To study the precise position and motion of its target objects, the spacecraft monitored each of them about 70 times over the five years of the nominal mission (2014–2019), and about as many during its extension. Due to its detectors degrading more slowly than initially expected, the data acquisition phase of the mission was given an extension, lasting...

Read on Wikipedia · Image European Space Agency, CC BY-SA 3.0 igo