ESA's Gaia Space Telescope Ends Decade-Long Mission Mapping Milky Way

The European Space Agency's (ESA) Gaia space telescope, launched in 2013, concluded its mission on Thursday, March 27, after over a decade of mapping the Milky Way. Gaia, operating from a stable orbit 1.5 million kilometers from Earth, has taken close to 3 trillion observations of 2 billion stars and objects, contributing to 13,000 scientific publications. The telescope mapped millions of galaxies, identified star clusters, discovered exoplanets, and tracked 150,000 asteroids. It also detected at least 33 black holes within the Milky Way. To prevent interference with other instruments like the James Webb and Euclid space telescopes, ESA moved Gaia to a "retirement orbit" at least 10 million kilometers from Earth. Scientists are preparing to release the fourth catalog of stars in 2026, based on data collected by Gaia.