Science performance of Gaia, ESA’s space-astrometry mission

By J. de Bruijne. 2012

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Gaia is the next astrometry mission of the European Space Agency (ESA), following up on the success of the Hipparcos mission. With a focal plane containing 106 CCD detectors, Gaia will survey the entire sky and repeatedly observe the brightest 1,000 million objects, down to 20th magnitude, during its 5-year lifetime. Gaia’s science data comprises absolute astrometry, broad-band photometry, and low-resolution spectro-photometry. Spectroscopic data with a resolving power of 11,500 will be obtained for the brightest 150 million sources, down to 17th magnitude. The thermo-mechanical stability of the spacecraft, combined with the selection of the L2 Lissajous point of the Sun-Earth/Moon system for operations, allows stellar parallaxes to be measured with standard errors less than 10 micro-arcsecond (μas) for stars brighter than 12th magnitude, 25 μas for stars at 15th magnitude, and 300 μas at magnitude 20. Photometric standard errors are in the milli-magnitude regime. The spectroscopic data allows the measurement of radial velocities with errors of 15 km s−1 at magnitude 17. Gaia’s primary science goal is to unravel the kinematical, dynamical, and chemical structure and evolution of the Milky Way. In addition, Gaia’s data will touch many other areas of science, e.g., stellar physics, solar-system bodies, fundamental physics, and exo-planets. The Gaia spacecraft is currently in the qualification and production phase. With a launch in 2013, the final catalogue is expected in 2021. The science community in Europe, organised in the Data Processing and Analysis Consortium (DPAC), is responsible for the processing of the data.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

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TRACING CHEMICAL EVOLUTION OVER THE EXTENT OF THE MILKY WAY'S DISK WITH APOGEE RED CLUMP STARS (2014, background): “High-resolution spectroscopic surveys, in combination with astrometry from Gaia (de Bruijne 2012) and high-precision asteroseismology data, will allow these relations to be investigated over a much larger volume of the disk than the local solar neighborhood, which has been the focus of past surveys.”
THE SHAPE OF THE INNER MILKY WAY HALO FROM OBSERVATIONS OF THE PAL 5 AND GD–1 STELLAR STREAMS (2016, unknown): “It is in this volume—soon to be mapped in detail by the Gaia satellite (de Bruijne 2012)—that we can determine the Milky Way’s mass and light budget (e.g., Flynn et al. 2006; Bovy & Rix 2013; McKee et al. 2015), the dark–matter halo’s shape and radial profile near and within its scale radius (e.g.,…”
MODULES FOR EXPERIMENTS IN STELLAR ASTROPHYSICS (MESA): PLANETS, OSCILLATIONS, ROTATION, AND MASSIVE STARS (2013, background): “The immediate future holds tremendous promise, as both the space-based survey Gaia (de Bruijne 2012; Liu et al. 2012) and the ground based Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST; Ivezic et al. 2008) come to fruition.”
Small scale problems of the $\Lambda$CDM model: a short review (2016, background): “Improvements were proposed measuring just one of three velocity components, and two of three position components [see 412], to obtain proper motions of the dwarves stars [374], and thus the half-light radius density slope, despite the challenge it poses with GAIA [411].”
The structure of the Milky Way's bar outside the bulge (2015, background): “In addition the Gaia mission (de Bruijne 2012) is capable of some elucidation of the long bar.”
Gaia Data Release 2 (2018, background): “Since the in-flight instrument differs from its nominal prelaunch prescription (Jordi et al. 2010; de Bruijne 2012), in particular regarding the passbands (see Fig.”
The TESS Input Catalog and Candidate Target List (2017, methodology): “The proper motions and parallaxes for Tycho-2 stars from the Gaia DR1 catalog (de Bruijne 2012; Gaia Collaboration et al. 2016) have also been cross-matched using the 2MASS IDs provided in the Gaia source catalog, and the Gaia DR2 catalog will be cross-matched for future TIC releases.”
Measuring the rotation period distribution of field M dwarfs with Kepler (2013, background): “In the longer term, the GAIA mission (de Bruijne 2012) will provide this information with greater precision and for more objects.”
THE APOGEE RED-CLUMP CATALOG: PRECISE DISTANCES, VELOCITIES, AND HIGH-RESOLUTION ELEMENTAL ABUNDANCES OVER A LARGE AREA OF THE MILKY WAY'S DISK (2014, background): “As detailed elemental-abundance patterns cannot be derived from broadband photometry, spectroscopic surveys are and will remain a necessary complement to large-area photometric and astrometric surveys (e.g., Pan-STARRS, Kaiser et al. 2002; SkyMapper, Keller et al. 2007; Gaia, 2 de Bruijne 2012).”
Approximate Universal Relations for Neutron Stars and Quark Stars (2016, background): “In fact, astrophysical missions, such as GRACE [40] and GAIA [41, 42], are designed to measure the multipole moments of Earth [40], and thus, be able to model and predict the motion of satellites in orbit to high accuracy.”
PHYSICS OF ECLIPSING BINARIES. II. TOWARD THE INCREASED MODEL FIDELITY (2016, background): “This decade has provided us with a range of ground-breaking surveys and missions: MOST (Walker et al. 2003), CoRoT (Baglin 2003), Kepler (Borucki et al. 2010), Pan-Starrs (Kaiser et al. 2002), Gaia (de Bruijne 2012), and LSST (Tyson & LSST 2002), to name just a few.”
HOW TO CONSTRAIN YOUR M DWARF: MEASURING EFFECTIVE TEMPERATURE, BOLOMETRIC LUMINOSITY, MASS, AND RADIUS (2015, background): “The ESA Gaia mission, launched in 2013 December, will enormously expand the number of M dwarfs with precise trigonometric parallaxes (de Bruijne 2012).”
Estimating Distances from Parallaxes (2015, background): “The two most important points here are (1) σ̟ is independent of ̟, and (2) σ̟ can be estimated from another measurement model using other measured data (de Bruijne 2012).1 Equation 1 has a finite probability of giving non-positive parallaxes, and this probability gets larger with increasing ftrue.”
The Tycho-Gaia astrometric solution. How to get 2.5 million parallaxes with less than one year of Gaia data (2014, methodology): “The ESA astrometry satellite Gaia was launched in December 2013 with the aim of mapping more than a billion stars (V <∼ 20) in our Galaxy (Perryman et al. 2001; de Bruijne 2012).”
THE ELEVENTH AND TWELFTH DATA RELEASES OF THE SLOAN DIGITAL SKY SURVEY: FINAL DATA FROM SDSS-III (2015, background): “…(Yanny et al. 2009), the RAdial Velocity Experiment (RAVE; Steinmetz et al. 2006), APOGEE, the Gaia/European Southern Observatory Survey (GES; Gilmore et al. 2012) and the massive Gaia survey itself (de Bruijne 2012) provide kinematic information and chemical diagnostics for large samples of stars.”
Close encounters of the stellar kind (2014, background): “Starting in 2016, we can expect data releases from Gaia which ultimately promises to provide astrometry with parallax accuracies between 0.005 and 0.5 mas on around 109 stars down to magnitude G = 20 (Lindegren et al. 2008; de Bruijne 2012).”
ZODIACAL EXOPLANETS IN TIME (ZEIT). III. A SHORT-PERIOD PLANET ORBITING A PRE-MAIN-SEQUENCE STAR IN THE UPPER SCORPIUS OB ASSOCIATION (2016, methodology): “While our current method relies on a stellar model, when Gaia parallaxes become available (Perryman et al. 2001; de Bruijne 2012) we can instead use transiting planets to test these models.”
They are small worlds after all: revised properties of Kepler M dwarf stars and their planets (2015, methodology): “The ESA Gaia spacecraft is obtaining precise spectrophotometry as well as parallaxes with precisions as good as 10 µas (de Bruijne 2012) of all Kepler target stars, including the M dwarfs.”
Trumpeting M dwarfs with CONCH-SHELL: a catalogue of nearby cool host-stars for habitable exoplanets and life (2014, methodology): “The Gaia satellite, launched in December 2013, will obtain parallaxes with a precisions of about 10 µas (de Bruijne 2012) thus allowing extremely precise determination of distance modulus.”