F. di Marco

TL;DR: Gaia as discussed by the authors is a cornerstone mission in the science programme of the European Space Agency (ESA). The spacecraft construction was approved in 2006, following a study in which the original interferometric concept was changed to a direct-imaging approach.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors evaluated the performance of the IBIS veto as evaluated during telescope commissioning, in particular, the efficiency of background rejection and the resulting IBIS dead time, as well as the impact of different zoning configurations.

TL;DR: The initial in-flight mission operations experience from ESA's ultra-precise Gaia spacecraft was described in this paper, where a series of problems were detected and tackled during commissioning and early phase operations, including an apparent dimming of the on-board laser and imaged stars, was tracked down to water ice building up inside the telescope enclosure.