ESA’s Gaia has completed its sky-scanning mission, observing over two billion stars and objects in the Milky Way, with data on asteroids, exoplanets, binary stars, and other galaxies. Gaia uses cold gas to maintain precision, consuming 55 kg over 15,300 spins. The data is processed by ESA and the Gaia Data Processing and Analysis consortium before being accessed millions of times and leading to thousands of scientific papers. Despite nearing the end of its mission, two more data releases are planned. The scale of Gaia’s achievements is staggering, revolutionizing our understanding of our cosmic neighborhood.
https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2025/01/Sky-scanning_complete_for_Gaia