Title: The Gaia mission: -14 months and counting

Speaker: Mario G. Lattanzi (National Institute for Astrophysics – Torino Astronomical Observ.)

Time: 2012, August 8th (Wednesday), 10:00A.M.

Location: Middle conference room(third floor)

ABSTRACT

Gaia, a cornerstone-class mission, is the next global space astrometry initiative of the European Space Agency targeted to reach the 25 micro-arc-second level accuracy at mag 15. Its main goal is to make the largest, most precise three-dimensional map of our Galaxy by surveying for five years more than a billion stars down to V=20. The survey is complemented with simultaneous multi-epoch photometry and spectroscopy, including radial velocity measurements.

Gaia is due for launch in Oct 2013 and the release of the final, full accuracy, science catalog to the community worldwide is anticipated for early 2021. However, ESA has decided that early/intermediate quality data of limited accuracy but potentially suitable to address prime science will be released to the scientific community at large even during Gaia’s operational life.

The talk will review the status of the mission and its organization, and recall the complexities of the global astrometric problem from space. It will then discuss the expected performances, in the light of the 'as-built' properties of the payload, and their impact on the mission science case with particular emphasis on the Milky Way as a testing ground of present-day predictions of cosmological models.

Mario's resume：

Mario G. Lattanzi is a senior associate astronomer at INAF-Torino Astromical Observatory(OATo), lecturer in "Fundamental Astronomy for the Milky Way" taught for the Master course in Physics at the University of Torino, and leader of the AstroGalTec(Astrometry, Galactic-studies and Technology) group at OATo.

Mario has participated in astrometry missions since the early 1980's when he was closely involved with the Hipparcos mission, in particular working on the development and implementation of the Hipparcos Sphere Reconstruction code in FAST, and as a member of the FAST committee (1989-1996). Since then he has been Instrument Scientist (1989-1995) and consultant (1995-1997) at STScI for the astrometric and photometric calibration and scientific exploitation of the FGS onboard Hubble, and co-PI of the Guide Star Catalog II (1997-2002).

He has been among the developers of the Gaia mission concept since its inception in 1993 and member of the ESA Gaia science team (GST) that led to the approval of the Gaia program in 2000 and 2002. He remained on the GST until 2005 when he became PI of the Italian participation in the mission for ASI, the Italian Space Agency. He is deputy of the of CU3 "Core Processing" Unit of DPAC (the European consortium appointed by ESA for data processing and analysis of the satellite data), head of the Astrometric Verification Unit within CU3 and coordinator for ASI of the DPCT, located at ALTEC in Torino, one of the six data processing centers involved in the Gaia data reduction.