Prev: P2.3 Next: P2.6

P2.4: Gracia Abril, Gonzalo
G. Gracia-Abril (Gaia DPAC Project Office, ESAC; Astronomisches Rechen-Institut, Zentrum für Astronomie, Uni. Heidelb)
D. Teyssier (Gaia DPAC Project Office, ESAC; Telespazio Vega UK Ltd for ESA / ESAC)
J. Portell (Gaia DPAC Project Office; Institut de Ciències del Cosmos, Universitat de Barcelona (IEEC- UB))
A.G.A. Brown (Leiden Observatory, Leiden University)
A. Vallenari (INAF - Osservatorio astronomico di Padova)
- F. Jansen, Mission Operations Division, Operations Department, Directorate of Science, European Space Research and Technology Centre - U. Lammers, European Space Astronomy Centre (ESA/ESAC)


Theme: Management of Large Science Project
Title: Gaia DPAC Project Office: Coordinating the production of the largest star catalogue.

The ESA Gaia satellite is creating the most accurate map ever of the Milky Way. The second release of the Gaia archive was made public in April 2018. The impact of this release in the scientific community can be quantified with the number of papers submitted since its publication, in average around 2 papers per day based on the released data since it was published. The Data Processing and Analysis Consortium (DPAC) is in charge of processing the Gaia data. More than 400 scientists and engineers distributed over 80 institutions in 20 countries work in DPAC. The challenge is to process the, today's figures, more than 1 trillion CCD observations, of around 2 billion sources, in 6 processing centers with more than 10 processing pipelines. The data produced is not only astrometric data but also high quality photometry, radial velocites and stellar parameters for many objects types. All these data are interdependent, output of some pipelines are required as input by other systems and, in many cases, the dependencies are cyclic. The DPAC Project Office, together with the sub group leaders in DPAC, is responsible to coordinate the consortium activities, managing inter-dependencies between the different groups and pipelines and schedule and monitor the data deliveries across the processing centers. We will present DPAC management structure and activities, the lessons learnt in the preparation of DR2 and the challenges for future releases.

Link to PDF (may not be available yet): P2-4.pdf