Today astronomers are saying sayonara to a remarkable spacecraft : a telescope that has keep nearly two billion stars in its 12 - year sprightliness . The Gaia Observatory from the European Space Agency ( ESA ) has now been powered down and beam into a “ retirement cranial orbit ” around the sun — but data from the mission will stay on to be free and analyzed for year to come .

Gaia ’s goal was to create a3D map of our total wandflower , and so far it has revealed the social organization of the Milky Way in the greatest detail ever incur . It has uncovered grounds that our galaxy was mold from past galactic mergers , spotted unexampled and antecedently unidentified whizz clustering , and help to describe object like exoplanets and black holes . The enormous treasure trove of data collected by the telescope has been the subject of three data release so far , with themost recent in 2022,but there will be more data to add up in time to come with a fourth data release planned for 2026 .

The originally planned life-time of the spacecraft was just five year , but its mission was extend until its fuel reserves dipped too crushed . When that happened , the Gaia team had to plan a manner to safely terminate the mission without the spacecraft drifting and potentially disrupting other ballistic capsule in the L2 orbit around the sun .

“ shift off a space vehicle at the last of its military mission vocalize like a simple enough job , ” said Gaia Spacecraft Operator Tiago Nogueira . “ But spacecraft really do n’t want to be exchange off . ”

“ Gaia was design to withstand failure such as radiation syndrome storm , micrometeorite impacts or a loss of communication with Earth . It has multiple redundant systems that insure it could always reboot and sum up surgery in the event of disturbance , ” Nogueira explained .   “ We had to project a decommissioning scheme that involved systematically pick apart and turn off the layers of redundance that have safeguarded Gaia for so long , because we do n’t need it to reactivate in the time to come and begin transmitting again if its solar panels find sun . ”

As the team were saying farewell to Gaia , they added a personal hint . The space vehicle ’s onboard software system was purposely corrupted so that it would n’t start back up again , and the team lead this chance to overwrite the software with a word of farewell message and the names of M of people who have do work on the commission .

As part of this cognitive process , some of Gaia's onboard software is being overwrite using word of farewell messages from its team on Earth , as well as the names of around 1500 people that have lend to the deputation over the days .

& mdash;ESA Operations ( @operations.esa.int)2025 - 03 - 27T08:34:48.875Z

“ Today , I was in charge of corrupting Gaia ’s processor faculty to check that that the onboard software program will never restart again once we have exchange off the spacecraft , ” allege Spacecraft Operations Engineer , Julia Fortuno . “ I have sundry feelings between the inflammation for these important end - of - living operations and the sadness of saying goodby to a spacecraft I have knead on for more than five years . I am very happy to have been part of this unbelievable mission . ”

The concluding messages send to Gaia will continue to be carried out into space as the observatory log Z’s , and as information from it continues to contribute to uranology . As Gaia Mission Manager Uwe Lammers put it : “ We will never blank out Gaia , and Gaia will never forget us . ”