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News from Gaia |
2005-01-15
Call for 'Letters of Intent' issued for Gaia data
processing
ESA has issued a call for Letters of Intent to participate
in the the data processing segment of the Gaia mission.
Individuals or institutes in ESA Member States wishing to
play a role in Gaia data processing from 2006 onwards should
submit a Letter of Intent outlining their possible future
involvement. Further details and the submission form are
available online.
2005-01-10 PWG recommendations for Gaia filter systems
Following extensive studies the Photometry Working Group has
recommended baseline filter systems for Gaia's Broad-Band and
Medium-Band Photometry systems. The C1B system
(5 filters, two of which share a CCD strip)
has been adopted for BBP; the C1M system (8
blue bands, 6 red bands) has been adopted for MBP. Further details are
available from the Photometry Working Group web site
under PS optimization.
2004-12-15 Data Processing tests 1-3 completed
The first meeting of the recently-formed Steering Committee
of the ongoing Gaia Data Access and Analysis Study (GDAAS)
has concluded that the first major phase of testing has
been completed successfully. Large-scale mission simulations
and data analysis runs have been executed over the last
three years, under the responsibility of software engineers
at GMV Madrid led by Pedro Perez, astronomers at the University
of Barcelona led by Jordi Torra, and using the CESCA (Supercomputing
Centre of Catalonia) facilities. A mission duration of 18
months, and simulated data for 200,000 stars distributed
over the sky, has been used. Results demonstrate that the
`global iterative solution', at the heart of the Gaia data
processing challenge, can be implemented as anticipated.
The various steps of object matching; source, attitude and
calibration updating; and relativistic geometry solution
are all included. The system is now being upgraded to a
larger-scale run using a more detailed instrument model,
and more realistic numerical algorithms. Results for this
next phase, GDAAS-2, are expected by June 2005. Naturally,
many complications and challenges still lie ahead.
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