As a group of stars having high luminosity and thus being able to be detected to great distances, massive M su-pergiants are extremely helpful to the study of the kinematics of the Milky Way. They are also partly responsible for the creation of post iron-group elements through the weak s-process of nucleosynthesis. As there are relatively few classified M supergiants, owing to their rapid pace of evolution, the identification of additional such stars will serve to significantly increase the sample that can be studied, which offers the promise of a higher fidelity in charting the regions of recent star formation in our Galaxy as well as a fuller description of trends that may be detected amongst their chemical compositions. We discuss the identification of M supergiants using the instrumentation onboard the Gaia satellite, emphasizing the nature of the photometric system that will best serve to classify M stars.
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