Gaia Mission Information

The Gaia Mission, a European Space Agency mission, launched on December 19, 2013 and was dedicated to mapping stars in the Milky Way Galaxy through astrometric measurements. The mission concluded science observations on January 15, 2025. Gaia measured precise positions of stars over time, which enables us to pinpoint the distance to these stars via parallax measurements. Additional photometric and spectroscopic measurements were made, which can also be used for precise stellar characterization. Over 3 trillion observations of 2 billion stars were made over the course of Gaia science operations.

Gaia Data Releases

Gaia has had three data releases since it was launched:

  • Gaia DR1 was released on September 14, 2016 and contained positions and magnitudes for more than 1.1 billion targets collected over 14 months.
  • Gaia DR2 was released on April 25, 2018 and its nearly 1.7 billion targets formed the basis of the TESS Input Catalog (TIC) (Stassun et al. 2018), which we use as the primary reference for planetary and stellar parameters in the absence of other published data.
  • Gaia DR3 was released on June 13, 2022 and contains information for over 1.8 billion targets.

Future Releases

  • Gaia DR4 is expected to release in December 2026 and is expected to yield the first large set of exoplanet candidates discovered via astrometry.
  • Gaia DR5 will be the final Gaia data release encompassing all mission data and is anticipated no earlier than the end of 2030.

Gaia DR3 Integration in the Exoplanet Archive

Most targets in the Exoplanet Archive have a TIC ID and a Gaia DR2 ID. Because each Gaia data release is a complete reprocessing of all Gaia data, it is not guaranteed that a target will retain the same ID as in the previous release, so we needed to perform a crossmatch in order to add Gaia DR3 IDs to the Exoplanet Archive.

The Gaia team provides a gaiadr3.dr2_neighbourhood crossmatch table that identifies Gaia DR3 targets within 2 arcseconds of a Gaia DR2 source. This crossmatch table provides information about angular distance and magnitude difference between all the matched targets. In order to select the most-likely Gaia DR3 match to a Gaia DR2 source, we limited the angular distance to less than 100 milliarcseconds and magnitude differences between -0.2 and 0.2, following guidance from Mora et al. (2022).

We have added this crossmatch table to the backend of the Exoplanet Archive. Gaia DR3 IDs will now be shown as aliases on Systems Overview pages, and you can select Gaia DR3 ID as a column in the Planetary Systems, Planetary Systems Composite Data, Stellar Hosts, and K2 Planets and Candidates tables. The Gaia DR3 column can also be accessed via a Table Access Protocol (TAP) query for these tables.



Last updated: 15 October 2025