Status of Gaia Science Operations One Year Into the Nominal Mission

摘要

Gaia is ESA's ambitious space astrometry mission. Launched on 19 Dec 2013 into a Lissajous orbit around L2, its main objective is to perform a stellar census of the 1000 million brightest objects in our galaxy (complete to magnitude 20) from which an astrometric catalog of micro-arcsec level accuracy will be constructed. Gaia commenced its nominal mission phase in July 2014 and, 14 months later, has delivered more than a quarter of a Trillion (250 × 10~9) astrometric measurements, 55 Billion (55 × 10~9) low-resolution, and 6 Billion high-resolution spectra. We critically review the daily operations system which processes the incoming satellite telemetry in near-real time for dissemination to other external processing centres and feeding into the health-monitoring of the satellite. Trial runs of the Astrometric Global Iterative Solution system are taking place in preparation for a first public catalogue release in summer next year and we also report on the status of these activities.