Gaia relies on the proven principles of ESA's Hipparcos mission to help solve one of the most difficult yet deeply fundamental challenges in modern astronomy: the creation of an extraordinarily precise three-dimensional map of about one billion stars throughout our Galaxy and beyond.

This massive stellar census provides the basic observational data to tackle an enormous range of important problems related to the origin, structure, and evolutionary history of our Galaxy.

The Gaia mission delivers an astronomical catalogue and data archive of unprecedented scope, accuracy and completeness. The first data releases our out and accessible from the Gaia Archive.