Gaia
European optical space observatory for astrometry
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| March 27 2025 | Gaia was decommissioned and passivated after leaving its orbit near L2 and being put into a heliocentric orbit away from Earth's sphere of influence. |
| March 27 2025 | ESA scientists switch off Gaia after more than a decade of service, sending the spacecraft into orbit around the sun and overwriting some of its onboard data. |
| January 15 2025 | Official end of science observations for the Gaia spacecraft. |
| January 10 2025 | Gaia performed its last targeted observation. |
| March 2023 | The Gaia mission was extended through the second quarter of 2025. |
| 2020 | Gaia mission was further extended through 2022, with an additional indicative extension through 2025. |
| 2019 | Completion of the initial five-year nominal mission period, with mission extension granted due to detectors not degrading as quickly as initially expected. |
| 2018 | The Gaia mission was extended to 2020. |
| July 3 2015 | Gaia released a map of the Milky Way by star density, based on spacecraft data. |
| 2014 | Beginning of the nominal mission, with the spacecraft starting to monitor astronomical objects approximately 70 times over the next five years. |
| August 30 2014 | Gaia discovered its first supernova in another galaxy. |
| August 21 2014 | Gaia began using its normal scanning mode which provides more uniform sky coverage. |
| July 25 2014 | Gaia began its nominal five-year period of scientific operations using a special scanning mode that intensively scanned the region near the ecliptic poles. |
| January 8 2014 | Gaia reached its designated orbit around the Sun-Earth L2 Lagrange point, approximately 1.5 million kilometers from Earth. |
| December 19 2013 | Gaia was successfully launched by Arianespace using a Soyuz ST-B rocket with a Fregat-MT upper stage from Kourou in French Guiana at 09:12 UTC. |
| October 2013 | ESA postponed Gaia's original launch date due to precautionary replacement of two transponders used for generating timing signals for data downlink. |
This contents of the box above is based on material from the Wikipedia article Gaia (spacecraft), which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.