BSC has contributed to Gaia since its inception, providing supercomputing resources and programming models
The European Space Agency’s Milky Way-mapper Gaia has completed the sky-scanning phase of its mission, racking up more than three trillion observations of about two billion stars and other objects over the last decade to revolutionise the view of our home galaxy and cosmic neighbourhood.
Launched on 19 December 2013, Gaia’s fuel tank is now approaching empty – it uses about a dozen grams of cold gas per day to keep it spinning with pinpoint precision. But this is far from the end of the mission. Technology tests are scheduled for the weeks ahead before Gaia is moved to its ‘retirement’ orbit, and two massive data releases are tabled for around 2026 and the end of this decade, respectively.
“Today marks the end of science observations and we are celebrating this incredible mission that has exceeded all our expectations, lasting for almost twice its originally foreseen lifetime,” says ESA Director of Science Carole Mundell.
“The treasure trove of data collected by Gaia has given us unique insights into the origin and evolution of our Milky Way galaxy and has also transformed astrophysics and Solar System science in ways that we are yet to fully appreciate. Gaia built on unique European excellence in astrometry and will leave a long-lasting legacy for future generations."
“After 11 years in space and surviving micrometeorite impacts and solar storms along the way, Gaia has finished collecting science data. Now all eyes turn towards the preparation of the next data releases,” says Gaia Project Scientist Johannes Sahlmann. “I am thrilled with the performance of this incredible mission, and excited about the discoveries that await us.”
Gaia delivers best Milky Way map
Gaia has been charting the positions, distances, movements, brightness changes, composition and numerous other characteristics of stars by monitoring them with its three instruments many times over the course of the mission.
This has enabled Gaia to deliver on its primary goal of building the largest, most precise map of the Milky Way, showing us our home galaxy like no other mission has done before.
As such, we now also have the best reconstructed view of how our galaxy might look to an outside observer. This new artist impression of the Milky Way incorporates Gaia data from a multitude of papers over the past decade.
BSC contribution
The Barcelona Supercomputing Center - Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC-CNS) has been contributing to Gaia since its inception, providing millions of hours of supercomputing at the MareNostrum supercomputer and programming models.
The PyCOMPSs programming model and the dislib machine learning library, developed by the BSC Workflows and Distributed Computing group, have been used in the software developed by the Gaia team to search for new open star clusters. And the BSC user support team has also assisted in data storage and transfer to other processing centers involved in the project.
