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GAIA

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16		ESA's pervious Hipparcos mission exceeded all expectations, cataloguing more than 100 000 stars to high precision, and more than a million to lesser precision. Hipparcos was so sensitive that it could have measured the diameter of a human hair at a distance of 20 km. Now that technology has improved, it is time for another mission with similar cataloguing aims as Hipparcos but with a much more ambitious payback.
	16	ESA's pervious Hipparcos mission cataloged more than 100 000 stars to high precision, and more than a million stars to lesser precision. Since the Hipparcos mission, technology has greatly improved and the successor mission, Gaia will provide with similar cataloguing aims as Hipparcos but with a much more ambitious payback.
17	17	The Gaia mission was proposed in October 1993 by Lennart Lindegren (Lund University, Sweden) and Michael Perryman (European Space Agency) in response to a call for proposals for ESA's Horizon Plus long-term scientific programme. Gaia was approved in 2000 as an ESA Cornerstone mission, and will be launched in 2013.The B2 phase of the project was authorized on 9 February 2006, with EADS Astrium taking responsibility for the hardware.
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