The European Space Agency (ESA) has powered down its Gaia spacecraft after more than a decade spent gathering data that are now being used to unravel the secrets of our home galaxy.On 27 March 2025, Gaia’s control team at ESA’s European Space Operations Centre carefully switched off the spacecraft’s subsystems and sent it into a ‘retirement orbit’ around the Sun.Though the spacecraft’s operations are now over, the scientific exploitation of Gaia’s data has just begun.
Sniff, our most successful scientific Spacecraft by publications. The new Voyage 2050 programme certainly provides science topics that could lead to a worthy successor.