Prospects for Gaia and other space-based surveys

Gaia is a fully-approved all-sky astrometric and photometric survey due for launch in 2011. It will measure accurate parallaxes and proper motions for everything brighter than G=20 (ca. 109 stars). Its primary objective is to study the composition, origin and evolution of our Galaxy from the 3D structure, 3D velocities, abundances and ages of its stars. In some respects it can be considered as a cosmological survey at redshift zero. Several other upcoming space-based surveys, in particular JWST and Herschel, will study star and galaxy formation in the early (high-redshift) universe. In this paper I briefly describe these missions, as well as SIM and Jasmine, and explain why they need to observe from space. I then discuss some Galactic science contributions of Gaia concerning dark matter, the search for substructure, stellar populations and the mass–luminosity relation. The Gaia data are complex and require the development of novel analysis methods; here I summarize the principle of the astrometric processing. In the last two sections I outline how the Gaia data can be exploited in connection with other observational and theoretical work in order to build up a more comprehensive picture of galactic evolution.