The space telescope Gaia has created the largest three-dimensional map of the Milky Way ever. On January 15, 2025, Gaia shut down after 11 years in space. But the research on data Gaia collected ...

Gaia has completed the mapping phase of its mission. Since its launch in 2013, the European Space Agency’s Gaia spacecraft has been charting our galaxy one star at a time. In those years, Gaia ...

The European Space Agency (ESA) has said goodbye to Gaia, its "billion star surveyor." After nearly 11 years of celestial science—twice its planned lifetime—the spacecraft's fuel supplies ...

Ga­ia’s im­age of the Milky Way ESA/Gaia/DPAC, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO. The European Space Agency (ESA) has released the most detailed catalog of our galaxy, using data from the Gaia mission launched ...

On Thursday, mission specialists at the European Space Agency sent Gaia, which is low on fuel, into orbit around the sun, and switched it off after more than a decade of service to the world’s ...

Gaia’s sprawling cosmic reckoning is now a cornerstone for most state-of-the-art Earth- and space-based telescopes, which rely on the mission’s target-dense celestial map to orient and ...

After more than a decade of mapping billions of stars across the Milky Way and beyond, a groundbreaking spacecraft is retiring. The European Space Agency’s space-based observatory known as Gaia ...

Astronomers bid an emotional farewell to Gaia, expressing their gratitude for its more than decade-long mission that gave us groundbreaking insights into our home galaxy, the Milky Way.

The ESA has finally shut down Gaia, its mind-blowing space mission to map the Milky Way. Despite its retirement, Gaia is far from done.

Gaia Spacecraft Operator Tiago Nogueira said turning Gaia off was complicated. "Switching off a spacecraft at the end of its mission sounds like a simple enough job," he said.

The spacecraft hitched a ride to space via a Soyuz-STB/Fregat-MT launch vehicle, which injected Gaia into the Sun-Earth Lagrange point 2, where Earth's and the Sun's gravitational pulls are balanced.

The European Space Agency (ESA) has said goodbye to Gaia, its "billion star surveyor." After nearly 11 years of celestial science—twice its planned lifetime—the spacecraft's fuel supplies ...