Well done Gaia & crew. [ https://www.spacedaily.com/reports/Star-mapping_space_telesc…t_999.html](https://www.spacedaily.com/reports/Star-mapping_space_telesc…t_999.html)

---

After more than a decade mapping out our home galaxy, the Gaia space telescope was powered down and sent into “retirement orbit” around the Sun on Thursday, the European Space Agency said.

Since launching in 2013, the telescope has been charting the positions, motion and properties of nearly two billion stars to create a vast map of the Milky Way, revealing many secrets of the cosmos along the way, the ESA said in a statement.

Gaia uncovered evidence of massive galaxies slamming into each other, identified vast clusters of stars, helped discover new exoplanets and mapped millions of galaxies and blazing galactic monsters called quasars.