Dr. Laurent Eyer
Geneva Observatory
University of Florida Astronomy Colloquium - April 22nd, 2009
The Gaia Mission
The Gaia mission is a cornerstone mission of the European Space Agency (ESA), selected in 2000 with a target launch of 2012. It is a survey mission, and aims at measuring repeatedly and with high accuracy basic parameters of about 1 billion sources (stars, solar system objects, QSOs, galaxies). Those parameters are the position of the sources, their apparent brightness, low resolution spectra in blue and red, a portion of their near Infra-Red spectrum, mainly to derive the radial velocity. Because of the repetition of the measurements over the 5 year mission, the parallaxes and proper motion will be determined in an unprecedented way. An overview of the Gaia mission will be presented, with its different aspects: the design, performances, the general planning, and the data reduction, with an emphasis on the analysis of variable objects.