Gaia is a cornerstone mission of the European Space Agency (ESA) selected in 2000, with a target launch date of 2011. The Gaia mission will perform a survey of about 1 billion sources brighter than V = 20. Its goal is to provide astrometry leading to parallaxes, proper-motions and positions. Astrometric data are complemented by multicolour photometry and a spectroscopic instrument (up to V = 17...

ESA’s Global Astrometric Interferometer for Astrophysics (GAIA) holds the promise of mapping out the detailed phase space structure of the Galactic halo by providing unprecedented annual proper motion and parallax of 1− 10μas astrometric accuracy (Gilmore et al. 1998). Unlike NASA’s Space Interferometry Mission (SIM), which will achieve similar accuracies but is a pointed instrument, GAIA will ...

This work continues investigation into Gaia theory [Lovelock, (1995) The ages of Gaia, Oxford University Press] from an artificial life perspective [Downing, (2000) in Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Artificial Life, (pp. 90-99) MIT Press], with the aim of assessing the general compatibility of emergent distributed environmental control with conventional natural selection. Ou...

GAIA is a short-listed candidate for the ESA Cornerstone mission C5, meeting the ESA Survey Committee requirement for an observatory mission, dedicated to astrometry, providing 10 micro-arcsecond accuracy at 15th magnitude. The GAIA mission concept follows the dramatic success of the ESA HIPPARCOS mission, utilising a continuously scanning spacecraft, accurately measuring 1-D coordinates along ...

The ESA Cornerstone Mission GAIA, to be launched prior to 2012 and with a nominal lifetime of 5 years, will improve the accuracy of Hipparcos astrometry by more than two orders of magnitude. GAIA high-precision global astrometric measurements will provide deep insights on the science of extra-solar planets. The GAIA contribution is primarily understood in terms of the number and spectral type o...

Eliciting the preferences of a decision maker is a crucial step when applying multi-criteria decision aid methods on real applications. Yet it remains an open research question, especially in the context of the Promethee methods. In this paper, we propose a bi-objective optimization model to tackle the preference elicitation problem. Its main advantage over the widely spread linear programming ...

The three papers in this issue of Climatic Change (Kirchner, 2002; Kleidon, 2002; Lenton, 2002) are probably the most concentrated effort in recent years by several prominent theoreticians of the biosphere to set forth their views on the current status and future of Gaia theory. (Also see the forthcoming volume by M.I.T. Press of the proceedings from the Second Chapman Conference on the Gaia Hy...

The Gaia mission is reviewed together with the expected contents of the final catalogue. It is then argued that the ultimate goal of Galactic structure studies with Gaia astrometry should be to build a dynamical model of our galaxy which is capable of explaining the contents of the Gaia catalogue. This will be possible only by comparing predicted catalogue data to Gaia’s actual measurements. To...

The paper addresses the issues raised by an ongoing digital cities project, coined Gaia Global, concerning how people can learn and use information. Gaia Global main concern is to introduce a 288.000 inhabitant’s city in Portugal – Gaia – to the information and knowledge society. The project aims to provide Gaia with a digital counterpart that represents the region in digital format. This digit...

The effectiveness of the ESA Gaia mission in obtaining a meaninful sample of supernovae (SNe) is based on three key points: detection rates, characterization capability and an extended validation phase. Focussing on the second, we present our investigations into the use of a range of classification techniques, whereby we demonstrate the ability to discriminate between various SN subtypes, based...