PRUSTI , T.

Gaia is an ESA cornerstone mission set to revolutionise our understanding of the Milky Way. Gaia is scheduled for launch in 2013, and is designed to map over one billion stars with three instruments to collect astrometric, photometric and spectroscopic data on stars in the Milky Way and in galaxies belonging to the Local Group, distant...

Gaia is an ambitious space astrometry mission of ESA with a main objective to map the sky in astrometry and photometry down to a magnitude 20 by the end of the next decade. While the mission is built and operated by ESA and an industrial consortium, the data processing is entrusted to a consortium formed by the scientific community, which was...

The ESA space astrometry mission Gaia will measure the positions, parallaxes and proper motions of the 1 billion brightest stars on the sky. Expected accuracies are in the 7 25 muas range down to 15 mag and sub-mas accuracies at the faint limit (20 mag). The astrometric data are complemented by low-resolution spectrophotometric data in the 330...

This paper presents the specification, design, and development of the Radial Velocity Spectrometer (RVS) on the European Space Agency's Gaia mission. Starting with the rationale for the full six dimensions of phase space in the dynamical modelling of the Galaxy, the scientific goals and derived top-level instrument requirements are discussed,...

Context. The Gaia-ESO Survey (GES) is a large public spectroscopic survey that was carried out using the multi-object FLAMES spectrograph at the Very Large Telescope. The survey provides accurate radial velocities, stellar parameters, and elemental abundances for ~115 000 stars in all Milky Way components. Aims: In this paper, we describe the...

International audience

International audience