The European Space Agency’s (ESA) Milky Way-mapper Gaia has completed its sky-scanning phase, accumulating over three trillion observations of two billion stars and other objects since its launch in 2013. The spacecraft is now running low on fuel, with approximately 55 kg of cold gas remaining for its 15,300 planned spacecraft “pirouettes.”
Gaia’s catalogue continues to grow, containing data on various celestial objects such as asteroids, exoplanets, and binary stars. The raw data are processed at ESA and the Gaia Data Processing and Analysis consortium, adding essential information before being made available for scientific use.
Since its first data release in 2016, Gaia’s catalogue has been accessed over 580 million times, resulting in the publication of over 13,000 scientific papers. Two massive data releases are still to come, marking the mission’s continued progress.
The Gaia spacecraft is set to swing through the Earth system this summer, with updates to be shared by ESA.
Source: https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2025/01/Sky-scanning_complete_for_Gaia