Importance Level: General Awareness

♤ Gaia (originally an acronym for Global Astrometric Interferometer for Astrophysics) is a European Space Agency (ESA) space mission in astrometry launched on 19 December 2013 by Arianespace from Kourou in French Guiana.

♤ Gaia is an ambitious mission to chart a three-dimensional map of our Galaxy, the Milky Way, in the process revealing the composition, formation and evolution of the Galaxy. Gaia will provide unprecedented positional and radial velocity measurements with the accuracies needed to produce a stereoscopic and kinematic census of about one billion stars in our Galaxy and throughout the Local Group. This amounts to about 1 per cent of the Galactic stellar population.