The Gaia mission

Understand

Gaia is a very ambitious mission of the European Space Agency.

• At the heart of Gaia lie the measurements of the positions, distances, space motions, brightnesses and astrophysical parameters of stars, which represent fundamental pillars of modern astronomical knowledge.
• We provide a brief description of the Gaia mission with an emphasis on binary stars.
• In particular, we summarize results of simulations, which estimate the number of binary stars to be processed to several tens of millions.