Gaia
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. Combined with astrophysical information
for each star, provided by on-board photometric instruments, these data
will have the precision necessary to quantify the early formation, and
subsequent dynamical, chemical and star formation evolution of the
Milky Way.
Additional scientific products include detection and orbital classification of tens of thousands of extra-solar planetary systems, a comprehensive survey of objects ranging from huge numbers of minor bodies in our Solar System, through galaxies in the nearby Universe, to some 500,000 distant quasars. It will also provide a number of stringent new tests of general relativity and cosmology.
Additional scientific products include detection and orbital classification of tens of thousands of extra-solar planetary systems, a comprehensive survey of objects ranging from huge numbers of minor bodies in our Solar System, through galaxies in the nearby Universe, to some 500,000 distant quasars. It will also provide a number of stringent new tests of general relativity and cosmology.
Building on our experience in processing the data from the Hipparcos mission, the main involvement of the CASU group in the Gaia project is with the photometric data processing. CASU are the largest group contributing to this task - CU5 (Photometric Processing). We also provide expertise to the tasks of attitude reconstruction and variable star analysis.