🛰️ Mission
Gaia
Mapped nearly two billion stars, then switched itself off.
- Launched
- 19 December 2013, 12 years ago
- Worked for
- 11 years, until 27 March 2025
- Built by
- ESA
- Sees
- Ordinary light
- Where it is
- Switched off in March 2025 and left in a quiet orbit around the Sun
- Best known for
- Measured where nearly two billion stars are, how far away and how they are moving — the map most of modern astronomy now starts from
Did you know?
- It spun slowly for eleven years, sweeping the whole sky over and over, measuring the same stars about seventy times each.
- Its measurements are so fine that from Earth it could tell the width of a human hair a thousand kilometres away.
- The spacecraft is off, but its data is not: astronomers are still working through what it sent, and releases are planned for years yet.
What it showed us
Betelgeuse
A red supergiant in Orion that will one day explode.
The Pleiades
The Seven Sisters: a family of young stars you can see without a telescope.
The Milky Way
Our home galaxy. The Sun is one of its hundreds of billions of stars.
Alpha Centauri
The closest star system to the Sun.
Explore more
All of missions
Hubble Space Telescope
Thirty-six years above the weather, and still working.
James Webb Space Telescope
A golden mirror that sees the first galaxies in infrared.
Chandra X-ray Observatory
The telescope that shows what is hot and violent.
Spitzer Space Telescope
Sixteen years of infrared, through dust that hides everything else.
Kepler
Stared at one patch of sky and found thousands of planets.
TESS
Kepler’s successor, watching the whole sky for planets.