I am involved in the development of routines for the photometric processing ("UNIT 5" of the Project) of data taken by the GAIA satellite (to be launched on December 2011).
Gaia is a European Space Agency (ESA) astrometry space mission, and a successor to the ESA Hipparcos mission. It was included within the context of the ESA Horizon 2000 Plus long-term scientific programme in 2000. It is expected to be launched by the ESA in the second half of 2011, and will be operated in a Lissajous orbit around the Sun-Earth L2 Lagrangian point.
- astrometric (or positional) measurements, determining the positions, distances, and annual proper motions of stars with an accuracy of about 20 µas (microarcsecond) at 15 mag, and 200 µas at 20 mag
- spectrophotometric measurements, providing multi-epoch observations of each detected object
- radial velocity measurements.
(Quotation from wikipedia's entry for GAIA mission)
In particular, I am involved in the DU11 of the UNIT 5, and I am working on java coding for the routines of BP/RP flux extraction and initial data treatment.
Some references for the GAIA Project:
- The ESA-GAIA homepage is a good starting place for more info.
- The promise of Gaia and how it will influence stellar ages, a paper by Carla Cacciari (astro-ph/0812.2354)
- The Gaia Project - technique, performance and status, a paper by Stefan Jordan (astro-ph/0811.2345)
- Learning about Galactic Structure with GAIA astrometry, a paper by Anthony G. Brown (astro-ph/0810.5437)
- Other publications selected by ESA