Gaia used its thrusters to push itself away from L2 and is now in a 'retirement orbit' around the Sun.
Gaia's main mission was to produce a detailed, three-dimensional map of the Milky Way galaxy.
Gaia measured brightnesses and variability, providing temperatures, gravitational parameters, and stellar types for millions of stars.
The Gaia team sent farewell messages and the names of around 1,500 people who worked on Gaia into the spacecraft's software.
The data collected by Gaia will be made available for research by 2030, with the last data release marking the official end of the mission.
Gaia's data will produce the largest existing star catalog, covering nearly two billion celestial bodies, or about one percent of our galaxy.
Gaia has been transferred to a stable orbit around the Sun, ensuring it will not return to the Earth-Moon system for the next 100 years.
Gaia operated for more than ten years of precise celestial measurements before its fuel was depleted.
Scientific operations for Gaia ended on January 15, 2025, but the mission data will be analyzed in the coming years.
The ESA's astrometry satellite Gaia was put into a final sleep state on March 27, 2025.
Stefan Jordan, head of public relations at the Gaia Data Processing Consortium, stated that the precision of Gaia's measurements represents a milestone in space research.
Gaia collected data on nearly two billion objects through over three trillion observations of the Milky Way.
Gaia was launched into space on December 19, 2013, by the European Space Agency using a Soyuz/Fregat rocket.
The first data catalog from Gaia was published in 2016, containing precise stellar positions and brightness for over one billion celestial bodies.
ESA’s Gaia spacecraft was launched in December 2013.
Gaia operates near the second Sun-Earth Lagrange point (L2) about 1.5 million kilometers from Earth.
Gaia teams reprocessed 156,764 asteroids using 66 months of data rather than the 34 months used for Gaia DR3.
Sener Aerospace’s work has supported missions and programs including HRE, SEOSAT/Ingenio, CHIME, LSTM, Hubble, Rosetta, SMOS, Pléiades, Herschel & Planck, JUICE, Athena, Solar Orbiter, Proba-3, Gaia, BepiColombo, ExoMars, Curiosity, Euclid, LISA Pathfinder, MTG, FLEX, LOP Gateway, Mars2020, Earth Explorers, COPERNICUS, and Galileo.
The group formed by GAF, IDEV-ic, AHT Group, and AMBERO is called the GAIA consortium.
The Ventus Award recognized Fugro’s work with Atlantic Shores Offshore Wind to implement a centralized, cloud-hosted geo-data engagement platform using Fugro’s Gaia.Hub technology.