https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2025/01/Sky-scanning_complete_for_Gaia

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Infographic, showcasing ESA's Gaia mission in numbers during its
sky-scanning phase
Science & Exploration

Sky-scanning complete for Gaia

15/01/2025 10274 views 55 likes 505425 ID
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ESA's Milky Way-mapper Gaia has completed 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 view of our home galaxy and cosmic neighbourhood.

Launched on 19 December 2013, Gaia's fuel tank is now approaching
empty - it uses about a dozen grams of cold gas per day to keep it
spinning with pinpoint precision: this amounts to 55 kg of cold gas
for 15 300 spacecraft 'pirouettes'.

Gaia's catalogue is ever-growing, containing data on stars and other
cosmic objects such as asteroids in our Solar System, exoplanets,
binary stars and other galaxies.

After the raw data are downlinked to Earth, ESA and the Gaia Data
Processing and Analysis consortium prepare the data for scientific
use, adding crucial information for their usage.

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

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

Read more

[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.]

  * CREDIT
    ESA/Gaia/DPAC, Milky Way impression by Stefan Payne-Wardenaar
  * LICENCE
    CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO or ESA Standard Licence
    (content can be used under either licence)

  * 
    Space Science
  * 
    Gaia
  * 
    Gaia Spacecraft

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