Monday

The ESA Gaia mission is creating a three-dimensional map of about one billion stars throughout our Galaxy and beyond. Gaia will determine their motions, which encode the origin and subsequent evolution of the Galaxy. With comprehensive photometric classification, it provides the detailed physical properties of each star: characterising their luminosity, temperature, gravity, and elemental composition. The Gaia census will provide the basic observational data to tackle an enormous range of important problems related to the origin, structure and evolutionary history of our Galaxy. This presentation will briefly describe the current status of the Gaia mission, and provide an update of the planning leading to the next Gaia Data Release 2, scheduled for release in Apr 2018.