The Scientific Goals of the GAIA Mission

Details The Scientific Goals of the GAIA Mission The Scientific Goals of the GAIA Mission

Aug 1997

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=1997esasp.402..743p&link_type=abstract

Proceedings of the ESA Symposium `Hipparcos - Venice '97', 13-16 May, Venice, Italy, ESA SP-402 (July 1997), p. 743-748

Computer Science

27

Scientific paper

The ESA candidate cornerstone mission GAIA is presently estimated to lead to positions, proper motions, and parallaxes of at least 40-50 million objects, down to about V=15 mag, with an accuracy of better than 10 microarcsec (and possibly some 350 million objects to 18 mag with degraded accuracy), along with multi-colour multi-epoch photometry of each object. Consequently, distances and kinematical motions for tens of millions of objects, throughout our Galaxy, would be obtained--the expected accuracy is such that direct (trigonometric) distance estimates would be accurate to 10 per cent at 10 kpc, with transverse motions accurate to about 1 km/s at 20 kpc. The mission would address directly questions such as the cosmic distance scale, and the formation and structure of the Galaxy (disk/halo/bulge populations and kinematics, and the dark matter content). By-products would be unprecedented information on the space-time metric (gamma to a precision of about 1 part in 10^6 or better); angular diameters of hundreds of stars; a vast body of information on double and multiple systems; extensive variability information on each object; and the most powerful and systematic method of detecting possible planetary companions proposed to date.

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