Gaia is definitely one of the more interesting missions of recent years. Expect to see numerous "mystery solved" and "scientists baffled" headlines coming out of this. :)
Hmm.... has anyone tried using, "no. clickbait articles generated ?" as a measure of mission performance ?
The European Space Agency will unveil on Wednesday a three-dimensional map of a billion stars in our galaxy that is 1,000 times more complete than anything existing today.
A space-based probe called Gaia, launched in December 2013, has been circling the Sun 1.5 million kilometres (nearly a million miles) beyond Earth's orbit and has been discreetly snapping pictures of the Milky Way. The satellite's billion-pixel camera, the largest ever in space, is so powerful it would be able to gauge the diameter of a human hair at a distance of 1,000 kilometres, meaning nearby stars have been located with unprecedented accuracy.
Just over half-way through its five-year mission, Gaia's two telescopes have located a billion stars. That's still only one percent of the Milky Way's estimated stellar population, scattered over an area 100,000 light years in diameter.
http://ow.ly/6SAG504t217
The slight worry about Gaia is that it is essentially a scaled-up version of Hipparcos, and nobody still knows why that got the distance to the Pleiades wrong, or what else it may have got wrong. ESA still refuses to even admit there was a problem with Hipparcos, so it's possible Gaia could be a very expensive bust.
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