DTPA Seminar: Timo Prusti

The Department of Theoretical Physics and Astrophysics invites you to the department seminary:

Timo Prusti: Gaia: Spacecraft, Mission and Scientific Results

The European Space Agency’s Gaia mission represents a cornerstone in modern astrophysics by delivering the most precise all-sky astrometric survey to date. This presentation will outline the spacecraft design and payload, briefly summarising the dual-telescope system, the billion-pixel CCD focal plane, and on-board spectrophotometry and radial velocity instrumentation. The mission concept—based on continuous scanning from the L2 Lagrange point—will be discussed in relation to its astrometric performance. Main focus of the presentation will be on a selection of key science results revealing the impact of Gaia data across many fields of astronomy.