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News & Announcements from Gaia

2010-03-15 Gaia Science Alerts Workshop (23-25 June 2010, Cambridge)
The main aim of the workshop is to focus community attention and involvement in the scientific possibilities that will arise from the Gaia Science Alerts data stream. The most important goals are: (a) To develop a roadmap for the coordination and preparation of ground based verification and follow-up observing campaigns; (b) To identify the most exciting targets of opportunity for the Gaia Science Alerts stream; (c) To improve the understanding of of the expected events and contaminants rates for Gaia alerts; (d) To improve requirements on the development and operation of the Gaia Alerts stream, including time-scales, sensitivity, acceptable contamination rates and so on. For more information, visit the workshop web page.

2010-03-03 European Science Foundation (ESF) funded GREAT research networking programme started
The objective of GREAT is to provide opportunities to the wider science community in the exploitation of the Gaia mission by supporting a science-oriented network addressing the scientific issues in which Gaia will have a major impact. The newly launched ESF funded GREAT research network, which will run until February 2015, will fund a wide range of community networking events.
The first open round of calls, for workshops, conferences, exchange visits and training schools, will be released in early March 2010 - with deadlines of 4 June 2010. Proposals to support networking events in science areas where Gaia will have a significant impact, will be welcome.
More information can be found on the GREAT website or at the ESF pages. Specific information related to the upcoming GREAT ESF RNP calls is located at http://www.great-esf.eu/participate/participate.html. You can also sign up to the GREAT mailing list by visiting https://lists.cam.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/ast-great-announce.

2010-02-25 A million CPU hours for Gaia simulation
GASS is one of the CU2 data generators, in charge of producing Gaia-like telemetry data to be injected in the processing chain, from IDT onwards. In order to run the GASS simulations needed for the DPAC End to End (E2E) testing, a total of 1,100,000 CPU hours have been allocated by the Red Española de Supercomputación (RES, the Spanish Supercomputing Network) in MareNostrum for the next four months. This will allow the generation of 18 months of telemetry for a scaled-down version of the sky suitable for this E2E testing. For more information, visit the following link.

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.

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