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News & Announcements from Gaia

2010-02-03 Gaia Project / DPAC Interface Control Document approved
The Gaia Project / DPAC Interface Control Document (GAIA-EST-ICD-05489) has been approved by DPACE and ESA and is now available on Livelink. The history of this document goes back to June 2006, when Carine Babusiaux first issued Requests for spacecraft and instrument specifications (GAIA-CD-TN-OPM-CB-010). After the first meeting on 21 February 2008 to discuss the DPAC needs, a list of items required by DPAC, and to be provided by ESA, has recently been agreed upon, covering the optical configuration, the detectors/electronics and focal plane assembly, the spacecraft attitude, the payload data handling unit, video processing unit, and telemetry, the basic angle monitoring and wavefront sensor devices, and the atomic clock. For more information, please contact the DPAC Project Office .

2010-01-29 Release of the new issue of the DPAC Newsletter
The DPAC Newsletter no. 7 is now available and there you will find information about the Project Office located at ESAC, how to improve the velocity determination of the spacecraft or about the ground-based observations needed to improve, test, calibrate or validate pieces of the data processing pipeline. For more information, visit the following link.

2010-01-27 Ten years Tycho-2 Catalogue
The Tycho-2 Catalogue of the 2.5 million brightest stars in the sky was released on the 8th of February 2000, and it has become one of the four most popular of all astronomical catalogues (see Erik Høg's recent note at the website where also publications and data are available). Tycho-2 contains positions, proper motions and two-colour magnitudes for the stars covering the entire sky. Positions and magnitudes were based on observations from 1989 to 1993 with Hipparcos. The Tycho-2 positions and 100 years of ground-based astrometry contained in more than 140 catalogues were utilized to obtain the proper motions.

2010-01-12 First Gaia mirrors completed
The Gaia project recently passed another major milestone with the completion of one-third of the ten payload mirrors. Final acceptance for the M5 and two M4 mirrors was granted by Delivery Review Boards conducted at the premises of Advanced Mechanical and Optical Systems (AMOS) in Liege, Belgium, towards the end of 2009. For more information, visit the ESA Science & Technology web pages.

2009-12-16 Gaia to lift off from Europe's Spaceport on a Soyuz launcher
Gaia will be carried into space by a Soyuz-STB/Fregat launch vehicle from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana. David Southwood, ESA’s Director of Science and Robotic Exploration, signed the contract for the launch with Jean-Yves LeGall, Chairman and CEO of Arianespace, at ESA Headquarters in Paris yesterday. For more information, visit the following web page.

2009-12-10 Gaia science performance webpage
A new webpage has been released summarising the current prediction of the Gaia science performance. The webpage summarises the expected accuracies of the astrometric parameters as function of magnitude, colour, and position in the sky. In addition, the expected precision of astrophysical parameters extracted from the photometric data is summarised, together with the expected accuracies of the radial velocities as function of magnitude for a range of stars with various spectral types. The webpage will be maintained and will act as central repository for world-wide publication of Gaia's science-performance predictions. It can be accessed from the Gaia main portal by clicking on "Science performance" in the left-hand menu or directly by following this link.

2009-11-16 ESA vodcast about astrometry
During the International Year of Astronomy, several video podcasts are being produced by ESA exploring the universe in which we live. Charting the Galaxy - from Hipparcos to Gaia discovers the motions of stars, how astronomers measure their distances and looks at the Gaia mission.

2009-11-05 Vacancy notice: Project Management Officer at ESAC (Spain)
The scientific chairman and the executive committee of the Gaia Data Processing and Analysis Consortium (DPAC) are supported by the DPAC Project Office (PO), to which the day-to-day management of the overall DPAC development and operations is delegated. The INAF (Italian National Institute for Astrophysics) announces the open position of Project Management Officer to be part of the DPAC PO staff. However, this position (like the rest of the PO members) is located at ESAC (Spain). The position, implemented by INAF and financed by ASI, the Italian Space Agency, is expected to run until about 2020. More information can be found in the following pdf file and link. Closing date for applications is 15 December 2009.

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