ESA – Sky-scanning finish for Gaia

ESA’s Milky Way-mapper Gaia has finishd the sky-scanning phase of its mission, racking up more than three trillion observations of about two billion stars and other objects over the last decade to revolutionise our see of our home galaxy and cosmic neighbourhood.

Launched on 19 December 2013, Gaia’s fuel tank is now approaching vacant – it engages about a dozen grams of freezing gas per day to uphold it spinning with pinpoint precision: this amounts to 55 kg of freezing gas for 15 300 spaceoriginate ‘pirouettes’.

Gaia’s catalogue is ever-increaseing, compriseing data on stars and other cosmic objects such as aanabolic agents in our Solar System, exoscheduleets, binary stars and other galaxies.

After the raw data are downconnected to Earth, ESA and the Gaia Data Processing and Analysis consortium set the data for scientific engage, compriseing vital alertation for their usage.

Since the accessibleation of the first Gaia data in 2016 and counting up to timely 2025, Gaia’s catalogue has been accessed more than 580 million times, resulting in the accessibleation of over 13 000 scientific papers.

This is far from the finish of the mission, two massive data frees are still to come.

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[Image Description: An infographic with the new artist impression of our Milky Way in the background, an artist impression of the Gaia space telescope in front of it, and numbers on the sky-scanning phase written in a circle in the foreground: 3 trillion observations, 2 billion stars & other objects observed, 938 million camera pixels on board, 15 300 spacecraft ‘pirouettes’, 55 kilogram cold nitrogen gas consumed, 3827 days in science operations, 50 000 hours ground station time used, 500 terabytes volume of data release 4 (5.5 years of observations), 142 terabytes downlinked data (compressed), 2.8 million commands sent to spacecraft, 13 000 refereed scientific publications so far, 580 million accesses of Gaia catalogue so far.]