Launched in December 2013, the European Star surveyor Gaia is charting the most detailed 3D map of some billion objects throughout the Milky Way and beyond – mainly stars but also clusters, exoplanets and asteroids – considering their movements, composition, colour, luminosity and temperature.
On October 10th 2023, a new wealth of highly interesting Gaia data was revealed, much to the delight of the scientific world, amongst other Belgian astrophysicists involved in the processing and analysis of Gaia information.

Thanks to the results gathered by this ground-breaking satellite carrying state-of-the-art SPACEBEL software, astronomers are getting a very accurate insight into our galaxy’s history, structure and evolution.

Published in June 2022, the third Gaia data release (Gaia DR3) is the most complete and most comprehensive catalogue of stars to date. 

Gaia’s latest “Focused Product Release” based, once again, upon an enormous amount of daily measurements provides another goldmine of unexpected findings, even surpassing the mission’s initial potential:

• Discovery of half a million new stars;
• Identification of more than 380 new possible gravitational lenses.
• Location of the exact positions of some 150.000 asteroids within our solar system.

With these new successful mission results our quest to unravel the mysteries of the cosmos definitely takes a giant leap forward. One thing is obvious: the fourth Gaia catalogue release (Gaia DR4), announced for the end of 2025, holds great promise!

These major breakthroughs are particularly significant for SPACEBEL as we have realised the management software of the Gaia Payload Data Handling Unit, i.e. a mass memory device storing the scientific data from seven video units that scan our galaxy and beyond before transferring them to the ground stations.

With Gaia, SPACEBEL notches up a remarkable reference thus confirming our expertise in the field of flight segment software.