THE GAIA ASTROMETRY MISSION

摘要

The European Space Agency has approved the Gaia programme as the sixth cornerstone mission of the Agency's Scientific Programme and decided at beginning of 2006 its Implementation Phase. Distance measurement has been historically one of the most fundamental challenges in astronomy. Gaia will provide positional, radial velocity and photometric measurements with the accuracies needed to produce a stereoscopic and kinematic census of about one billion stars throughout our Galaxy and into the Local Group. The survey aims for completeness to magnitude 20, with accuracies of 12-24 micro-arcsecond at magnitude 15. This paper presents the mission, the spacecraft and its high precision payload.