We can judge the value of any scientific endeavour based on how much of our knowledge it overturns or transforms. By that metric, the ESA’s Gaia mission is a resounding success.
The spacecraft gave us a precise, 3D map of our Milky Way galaxy and has forced us to abandon old ideas and replace them with compelling new ones.
Currently, we’re marking the end of the Gaia mission, our best effort to understand the Milky Way. Gaia is an astrometry mission that’s built an impressive map of the Milky Way by taking three trillion observations of two billion individual objects in the galaxy, most of them stars, over an 11-year period.
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