2026-05-26 From Gaia to GaiaNIR - Science from Precision Astrometry Across the Universe and Beyond the Extinction Barrier - 1st Announcement

26 May 2026

This conference celebrates the achievements of the MWGaiaDN Doctoral Network, which features PhD projects focused on the science that can be extracted from Gaia DR3 and Gaia DR4. Topics covered are the Milky Way as a galaxy, stars and planets, and Active Galactic Nuclei in the context of reference frames. MWGaiaDN projects also look towards... read more

2026-05-26 Gaia's mission extension case explained

26 May 2026

A page was published explaining in detail the Gaia mission extension case. Following a successful launch in December 2013 and a 6-month commissioning phase, Gaia started its nominal 5-year operations phase in July 2014. This phase was completed at the end of June 2019, after which Gaia entered its extended mission phase. The mission extension... read more

2026-05-07 Announcement of Gaia Data Release 4 date

7 May 2026

Gaia Data Release 4 (Gaia DR4) is planned for Wednesday, 2 December 2026. This data release is the first principal data release of the Gaia mission and encompasses the data collected during the first 5.5 years of observations. Detailed information on the content of Gaia DR4 is progressively made available... read more

Gaia Bulletin #07

23 April 2026

Gaia bulletin #07 is out now. Thease are Gaia data user notifications covering December 2025 - April 2026.

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2026-04-21 New Gaia Archive release

21 April 2026

Last week the upgrade to Gaia archive release 3.12 was performed. It features several major improvements in the performance of the web user interface (web GUI) and the performance of certain types of ADQL queries, particularly those that combine cone searches with joins between several tables (see this news item). In case of questions, please... read more

2026-04-14 Gaia Helpdesk migration

14 April 2026

On Friday 17 April 2026, the Gaia helpdesk ticketing system will be migrated to a new application. If you contact the Gaia helpdesk by email, no changes are expected. If you contact the helpdesk using the ticketing system, you will notice that the interface looks different. The URL of the ticketing system will remain the same. 

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2026-03-06 Gaia DR4 update

6 March 2026

To help the scientific community preparing for Gaia DR4 we are progressively publishing relevant information here. We now added the themes of the main Gaia collaboration papers that will be released with Gaia DR4 at https://www.cosmos.esa.int/web/gaia/dr4-papers

In June 2026, we plan to publish more detailed information including:

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2026-03-06 ESA Archival Research Visitor Programme call open

6 March 2026

ESA welcomes applications from scientists interested in pursuing research projects based on data publicly available in the ESA Space Science Archives.

The ESA Archival Research Visitor Programme is open to scientists who are affiliated with institutes in ESA Member States and Cooperating States. All visits must comply with the ESA... read more

2026-03-05 New Gaia vacancy

5 March 2026

A vacancy is out for a postdoctoral researcher on Gaia tool development and data analysis at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany. More details here.

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