Monday

Gaia’s second data release (DR2) will publish the positions, parallaxes, and proper motions for about 1 billion stars in April 2018. Gaia’s Radial Velocity Spectrometer (RVS) is obtaining spectra for the brightest 150 million of these stars. RVS's contribution to Gaia DR2 is median radial velocities for sources brighter than Grvs = 12 mag. The data processing is ongoing so we cannot give final numbers. Nevertheless, we can estimate numbers by assuming G - Grvs = 1 mag, meaning Grvs = 12 mag corresponds to G = 13 mag and Gaia’s first data release contains about 7.7 million stars brighter than G = 13 mag, the majority of which will have their radial velocity measured by RVS and be published in DR2. I will present the UK’s contribution to the RVS instrument, its status and its contribution to DR2 and beyond.