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Composite Image of the last Penumbral Lunar Eclipse from friday night (10-11/02/2017) taken by Eduard Masana.
+Information about the Eclipse
+Information about the Eclipse
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Composite Image of the last Lunar Eclipse (10-11/02/2017)
The exhibitions "Telescopi Assumpció Català" and "Amb A d'AstrònomA" are exhibited these days in the Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Sciences of the University of Barcelona, and in the Faculty of Sciences of the Autonomous University of Barcelona, on the occasion of The celebration of the International Day of Girls and Women in Science.
Telescopi Assumpció Català
Amb A d'AstrònomA
Telescopi Assumpció Català
Amb A d'AstrònomA
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The Day of the Girl an Woman in Science celebrated by the ex
Some 200 astronomers, scientists, engineers and programmers from the Data Processing and Analysis Consortium (DPAC) of the Gaia mission, met in Sitges from 23 to 27 January 2017. During this meeting, experts from various units and centers had the opportunity to share their progress in the mission and the results obtained so far, including those obtained from the first publication of the data made just last September. Upcoming tasks of development and implementation were also discussed, especially for the next publication and beyond. The large attendance, the several parallel meetings, and the results shown at the meeting all attest to the excellent progress of the mission and the smooth functioning of the consortium.
Web of the meeting: http://icc.ub.edu/congress/dpac2017/
Picture's album: http://icc.ub.edu/congress/dpac2017/images/album/
Interview with the ICCUB researcher X. Luri recorded during the meeting, Miracel Radio (Sitges): http://icc.ub.edu/news/314
http://www.ub.edu/web/ub/ca/menu_eines/noticies/2017/fotonoticies/001.html
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DPAC meeting attests to the excellent progress of Gaia missi
ICCUB member and former director Domènec Espriu has taken office as the new vice rector of research at the University of Barcelona (UB). He is part of the governing team of the recently appointed rector of the UB, professor Joan Elias.
In the recent elections for the Rector’s Office which took place on November 28th and December 1st, Dr. Joan Elias, professor of Mathematics, was elected after having obtained 53,07% of the weighted vote. The new rector took office on December 19 and the following day various vice rectors were appointed, among them the ICCUB member and former director Domènec Espriu.
Domènec Espriu works on particle physics phenomenology. He obtained his doctoral PhD in 1982, and after several postdoctoral and professor positions at the University of Oxford, Harvard University, University of Valencia and CERN, he joined the particle physics group at the University of Barcelona, then lead by the late professor Pere Pascual.
Apart of his contributions to physics as university professor, Dr. Espriu has occupied several other positions. During 2000-2003 he was head of the ECM department at the UB, and during 2004-2007 he was in charge of the Spanish Funding Agency for Particle Physics, supporting, among other contributions, the construction and start-up of the Canfranc Underground Astrophysics Laboratory and the CPAN (National Center for Particle, Astroparticle and Nuclear Physics) project. He was also vice-chairman of the Astroparticle Physics European Coordination Committee during this period, and member of various other committees. Dr. Espriu also promoted the Institute of Cosmos Sciences (ICCUB), created in November 2006, and became its first director in 2007. During the period 2008-2012 he was the first chairman of the LHC computing scrutiny group by appointment of the CERN Director-General.
The governing team of professor Joan Elias has declared that one of their main objectives is to provide a significant boost to research at the UB. The UB is already the top-ranked Spanish University and the only Spanish University that is a member of the European League of Research Universities (LERU). The so-called UB-100 strategy advocated by the new Rector aims at placing the UB among the top 100 universities worldwide in the medium term.
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Domènec Espriu, new research vice rector of the UB
The Gaia UB group with the Joan Oró Telescope at Montsec has participated in the elaboration of the light curve of the microlensing event Gaia 16aye which is the image of the week of the ESA's Gaia page.
The lens of the Gaia16aye event, a little unusual because it was found towards the Galactic spiral arms, is likely to be a binary star system.
Gaia16aye is the perfect example of the importance of ground-based follow-up of Gaia Alerts, carried out by professionals but also by amateur astronomers, which can make a huge scientific impact
The Gaia Science Alerts project has already reported more than 1000 transient events, mainly dominated by supernovae and cataclysmic variables. In July and August 2016 the first microlensing events were detected. Microlensing happens when light rays from a distant star (we call this the source) are bent by the space-time curvature of an object (e.g. a star, a planet, or a black hole), lying exactly between the observer and the distant star. This hitherto unseen object is called the lens, and being closer to us, and moving faster across the sky, leads to a sometimes dramatic increase (and then decrease) in the brightness of the background source. These two Gaia events are a little unusual, because they were found towards the Galactic spiral arms, while most microlensing events are found in studies which concentrate on the central region (the Bulge) of the Milky Way.
The first microlensing event, called Gaia16aua, was identified independently by both Gaia and by the ground-based Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment (OGLE). The second microlensing event, called Gaia16aye, might be even more exciting showing an interesting lightcurve as shown in the figure above.
Gaia16aye has been followed-up from the ground very intensively and more than 6000 data points were collected so far by a dedicated follow-up team (listed at the end). The light curve of the event exhibits characteristic U-shaped changes and sudden sharp increases and decreases in brightness. These distinctive features are typical for a microlensing event when the lens is not a single object, but rather a pair. In this case the lens is likely to be a binary star system sitting in its complicated space-time geometry. This creates caustics, which lead to sudden jumps in brightness when crossed by the light rays from the lensed source.
As can be seen in the figure, the model predicts another sharp rise in brightness which is expected to happen in the first or second week of November 2016. We are currently waiting for the final predicted re-brightening, which will help solve the puzzle of the exact nature of the components of the binary system. Gaia16aye is the perfect example of the importance of ground-based follow-up of Gaia Alerts, carried out by professionals but also by amateur astronomers, which can make a huge scientific impact. Indeed, it would have been quite difficult to confirm Gaia16aye as a microlensing event without the extra follow-up, and certainly the binary nature of the lens, and constraints on the system components would be impossible.
Gaia Alerts
The Gaia satellite is an European Space Agency mission to map out our own galaxy, the Milky Way. To do this, Gaia will look at the entire sky over and over for five years, so that it can track the positions of the stars over time. But while Gaia is looking at the sky, it will also spot thousands of transients.
A transient is anything which appears, disappears or changes in the sky. Some of these transients can be stars exploding as supernovae, or black holes swallowing stars. The Gaia Alerts project is working to find out such events in the data from Gaia, and announce them to the world in real time.
When a transient is detected by Gaia an alert is triggered and the follow-up network of ground-based telescopes starts its work in order to give more information about the phenomenon.
The Gaia Science Alert Project invites amateur astronomers and scholars to contribute to the investigations. The information about participation terms are available at https://gaia.ac.uk/alerts
Joan Oró Telescope (TJO)
The Observatori Astronòmic del Montsec with the Telescopi Joan Oró is the third most contributing observatory among all of the participants in the Gaia photometric science alert project.
Telescopi Joan Oró has the capability to change the observatory scheduling in real time with the minimal human interaction as requires the Transient phenomena.
More information on Montsec Observatory can be found at www.oadm.cat/en/.
ESA news
The observatories already involved in following up this event are:
AAVSO, USA
APT2, Italy
Aristarchos Telescope, Greece
ASAS-SN, Hawaii, USA
Asiago, Italy
ASV, Serbia
Bialkow, Poland
Kryoneri, Greece
Leicester University, UK
LCOGT/SUPAscope network
Liverpool Telescope, La Palma, Spain
Loiano, INAF-OABO, Italy
Joan Oró Telescope, Montsec, Spain
Mercator, La Palma, Spain
Montarrenti, Italy
NOT, La Palma, Spain
Ondrejov, Czechia
OmicronC2PU, France
Ostrowik, Poland
Palomar 200-inch telescope (P200), Caltech, USA
PIRATE, Tenerife, Spain
pt5m, La Palma, Spain
RTT150, Turkey
SALT, South Africa
Skinakas, Greece
Sternberg Observatory, Russia
T100, Turkey
T60, Turkey
UBT60, Turkey
University College London, UK
Watcher, South Africa
Wise, Israel
Yerkes-41, USA
The lens of the Gaia16aye event, a little unusual because it was found towards the Galactic spiral arms, is likely to be a binary star system.
Gaia16aye is the perfect example of the importance of ground-based follow-up of Gaia Alerts, carried out by professionals but also by amateur astronomers, which can make a huge scientific impact
The Gaia Science Alerts project has already reported more than 1000 transient events, mainly dominated by supernovae and cataclysmic variables. In July and August 2016 the first microlensing events were detected. Microlensing happens when light rays from a distant star (we call this the source) are bent by the space-time curvature of an object (e.g. a star, a planet, or a black hole), lying exactly between the observer and the distant star. This hitherto unseen object is called the lens, and being closer to us, and moving faster across the sky, leads to a sometimes dramatic increase (and then decrease) in the brightness of the background source. These two Gaia events are a little unusual, because they were found towards the Galactic spiral arms, while most microlensing events are found in studies which concentrate on the central region (the Bulge) of the Milky Way.
The first microlensing event, called Gaia16aua, was identified independently by both Gaia and by the ground-based Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment (OGLE). The second microlensing event, called Gaia16aye, might be even more exciting showing an interesting lightcurve as shown in the figure above.
Gaia16aye has been followed-up from the ground very intensively and more than 6000 data points were collected so far by a dedicated follow-up team (listed at the end). The light curve of the event exhibits characteristic U-shaped changes and sudden sharp increases and decreases in brightness. These distinctive features are typical for a microlensing event when the lens is not a single object, but rather a pair. In this case the lens is likely to be a binary star system sitting in its complicated space-time geometry. This creates caustics, which lead to sudden jumps in brightness when crossed by the light rays from the lensed source.
As can be seen in the figure, the model predicts another sharp rise in brightness which is expected to happen in the first or second week of November 2016. We are currently waiting for the final predicted re-brightening, which will help solve the puzzle of the exact nature of the components of the binary system. Gaia16aye is the perfect example of the importance of ground-based follow-up of Gaia Alerts, carried out by professionals but also by amateur astronomers, which can make a huge scientific impact. Indeed, it would have been quite difficult to confirm Gaia16aye as a microlensing event without the extra follow-up, and certainly the binary nature of the lens, and constraints on the system components would be impossible.
Gaia Alerts
The Gaia satellite is an European Space Agency mission to map out our own galaxy, the Milky Way. To do this, Gaia will look at the entire sky over and over for five years, so that it can track the positions of the stars over time. But while Gaia is looking at the sky, it will also spot thousands of transients.
A transient is anything which appears, disappears or changes in the sky. Some of these transients can be stars exploding as supernovae, or black holes swallowing stars. The Gaia Alerts project is working to find out such events in the data from Gaia, and announce them to the world in real time.
When a transient is detected by Gaia an alert is triggered and the follow-up network of ground-based telescopes starts its work in order to give more information about the phenomenon.
The Gaia Science Alert Project invites amateur astronomers and scholars to contribute to the investigations. The information about participation terms are available at https://gaia.ac.uk/alerts
Joan Oró Telescope (TJO)
The Observatori Astronòmic del Montsec with the Telescopi Joan Oró is the third most contributing observatory among all of the participants in the Gaia photometric science alert project.
Telescopi Joan Oró has the capability to change the observatory scheduling in real time with the minimal human interaction as requires the Transient phenomena.
More information on Montsec Observatory can be found at www.oadm.cat/en/.
ESA news
The observatories already involved in following up this event are:
AAVSO, USA
APT2, Italy
Aristarchos Telescope, Greece
ASAS-SN, Hawaii, USA
Asiago, Italy
ASV, Serbia
Bialkow, Poland
Kryoneri, Greece
Leicester University, UK
LCOGT/SUPAscope network
Liverpool Telescope, La Palma, Spain
Loiano, INAF-OABO, Italy
Joan Oró Telescope, Montsec, Spain
Mercator, La Palma, Spain
Montarrenti, Italy
NOT, La Palma, Spain
Ondrejov, Czechia
OmicronC2PU, France
Ostrowik, Poland
Palomar 200-inch telescope (P200), Caltech, USA
PIRATE, Tenerife, Spain
pt5m, La Palma, Spain
RTT150, Turkey
SALT, South Africa
Skinakas, Greece
Sternberg Observatory, Russia
T100, Turkey
T60, Turkey
UBT60, Turkey
University College London, UK
Watcher, South Africa
Wise, Israel
Yerkes-41, USA
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Microlensing Follow up, image of the week on the ESA's Gaia
On Wednesday September 28, the Nobel Prize in Physics and NASA astrophysicist John C. Mather visited the facilities of the Institute of Cosmos Sciences (IEEC-UB) at the Faculty of Physics of the University of Barcelona accompanied by the institute director Lluís Garrido and the scientific director José María Paredes.
John C. Mather is the senior project manager of James Webb Space Telescope, which NASA plans to launch into space in 2018. During his visit students of the faculty had the opportunity to delve into this huge project with a John C. Mather conference at the Aula Magna Enric Casassas.
In front of a packed out auditorium, the winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2006 explained that the James Webb Space Telescope will be the most powerful ever built. And that it will open new areas in astronomy, with observations ranging from the first stars, galaxies and black holes, to the growth of galaxies, the formation of stars and planetary systems, the evolution of planetary systems and living conditions here on earth, and perhaps elsewhere.
The visit finished with an informal meeting with ICCUB senior researchers and engineers, in which scientific issues that are currently being studied at ICCUB were discussed and new research proposals were made.
Mather compares the interpretation of the images we receive from space to the images of the audience of a football stadium. "We interpret images to know the history of the father who takes his son to football, those who have spent their lifetime going to the football stadium ... Similarly we must interpret images of space to know the story of the Universe," says Mather.
John C. Mather awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2006 for discovering the black body form and anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background.
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The laureate Nobel Prize in Physics John C. Mather visits th
Next September 27, 28 and 29 the auditory Enric Casassas of the Faculty of Physics of the University of Barcelona will host the second workshop of THOR “Exploring energization in space plasma turbulence”. The Heliospheric physics and space weather group, at the Institute of Cosmos Sciences (IEEC-UB), organizes the workshop. The European Space Agency, the ICCUB and the Faculty of Physics sponsor it.
THOR is one of the three missions selected out of 27 candidate concepts submitted to the fourth call of Medium Class missions of the European Space Agency. The three selected target areas include the study of exoplanets (ARIEL), the X-ray universe (XIPE) and plasma physics (THOR). All three missions are currently going through Phase A (industrial and payload) studies, which will pave the way for the selection of one mission to continue to Phase B1 around June 2017.
THOR is one of the three missions selected out of 27 candidate concepts submitted to the fourth call of Medium Class missions of the European Space Agency. The three selected target areas include the study of exoplanets (ARIEL), the X-ray universe (XIPE) and plasma physics (THOR). All three missions are currently going through Phase A (industrial and payload) studies, which will pave the way for the selection of one mission to continue to Phase B1 around June 2017.
The main goal of the workshop is to provide a forum to discuss important aspects strengthening the THOR science case, payload and operations. This involves the participation of payload teams, numerical simulation teams, and different scientists to prepare all the material (such as the Yellow Book) necessary for the down-selection of THOR.
The THOR workshop in Barcelona will last three days — the first day will be dedicated to presentations about the mission and the instrumentation and the last two days will review the current state of the art of plasma heating and particle acceleration in turbulent plasmas. About 125 participants from all over the world (especially from USA, Europe and Japan) will attend. The workshop will take place at the Aula Manga Enric Casassas of the Faculty of Physics of the University of Barcelona.
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UB hosts the second THOR workshop “Exploring plasma energiza
A Gaia science alert was triggered last 5 August when the object Gaia16aye was found 1.2 magnitudes brighter than during previous Gaia observations (the latest of which conducted on 20 June).
Follow-up ground-based observations reveal a red source gradually brightening at a rate of about 0.1 magnitudes per day without changing its colour and showing no fast variability. The observations obtained on 13 August show the object reached and its brightening rate increased to 0.6 magnitudes per day.
The ground-based photometric measurements are being conducted with the 0.8m telescopi Joan Oro at l'Observatori Astronomic del Montsec, the 0.6m telescope of the SAI Southern Station in Crimea, the pt5m telescope at the Roque de los Muchachos observatory on La Palma, the 0.6m Akdeniz Univ. UBT60 in the TUBITAK National Observatory, Antalya, and the 0.8m telescope at Serra La Nave.
The information about this phenomenon was published in The Astronomer’s Telegram (http://www.astronomerstelegram.org/?read=9376). The ICCUB (IEEC-UB) astronomer Josep Manel Carrasco, co-author of this article, commented that after its publication more observations were made which indicate that it can be a microlensing event caused by a binary lens, which produces an asymmetric light curve. Probably the first peak of the curve was not detected by Gaia and the alert was activated once the first peak was already decreasing.
You can find the light curve upated at:
http://gsaweb.ast.cam.ac.uk/alerts/alert/Gaia16aye/followup
Gaia Alerts
The Gaia satellite is an European Space Agency mission to map out our own galaxy, the Milky Way. To do this, Gaia will look at the entire sky over and over for five years, so that it can track the positions of the stars over time. But while Gaia is looking at the sky, it will also spot thousands of transients.
A transient is anything which appears, disappears or changes in the sky. Some of these transients can be stars exploding as supernovae, or black holes swallowing stars. The Gaia Alerts project is working to find out such events in the data from Gaia, and announce them to the world in real time.
When a transient is detected by Gaia an alert is triggered and the follow-up network of ground-based telescopes starts its work in order to give more information about the phenomenon.
The Gaia Science Alert Project invites amateur astronomers and scholars to contribute to the investigations. The information about participation terms are available at https://gaia.ac.uk/alerts
Joan Oró Telescope (TJO)
The Observatori Astronòmic del Montsec with the Telescopi Joan Oró is the third most contributing observatory among all of the participants in the Gaia photometric science alert project.
Telescopi Joan Oró has the capability to change the observatory scheduling in real time with the minimal human interaction as requires the Transient phenomena. More information on Montsec Observatory can be found at www.oadm.cat/en/.
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Telescope Joan Oro participate in the detection of Gaia16aye
The researcher and deputy director of the Institute of Cosmos Sciences (IEEC-UB), Francesca Figueras, has been elected as new president of the Spanish Society of Astronomy (SEA) in its XII scientific meeting that was held last week in Bilbao. Figueras will take over as president of the SEA in January 2017 replacing Javier Gorgas who chaired the company since 2013.
First woman president of the SEA
First woman president of the SEA
It is the first time that a woman becomes president of SEA in the 24 years of existence of the society. “Our community of professional astronomers has had a sustained and significant growth since the seventies until today. We have achieved and consolidated not just a prominent role for our researchers at international level but also the participation of Spanish companies in the development of large infrastructure projects in astronomy , some of which are now fully operational and others spectacular, come. The astronomers, from the beginning and throughout this process, we fully participated in this collective effort thanks largely to the passion for astronomy and perseverance in our work. There are many challenges that lie ahead, since the determination of the mass of the neutrino and its involvement in cosmological models to full equal opportunities for men and women. We of course would meet these challenges short term, and are therefore essential our young postdoctoral and predoctoral “said Francesca Figueras.
XII scientific meeting of the SEA
Approximately 350 professionals astronomy have gathered in Bilbao and have participated in a total of 220 lectures and presentations, including plenary lectures and specialized parallel sessions in galaxies and cosmology, the Milky Way and its components, planetary science, solar physics, instrumentation and supercomputing and dissemination and teaching of astronomy. During the meeting also it presented its Plan for Gender Equality of the SEA.
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Francesca Figueras, new president of the Spanish Society of
ESA's billion-star surveyor Gaia, launched on 19 December 2013, and in routine science operations since 25 July 2014, will release the first mission data on 14 September 2016.
Gaia is designed to map more than 1 billion stars in our Galaxy, and to provide positions, parallaxes and proper motions at an unprecedented accuracy level, far below a milliarcsecond. These accuracies can only be achieved after a complex data processing that requires observations taken throughout the 5-year nominal mission. For this reason, the final Gaia results will not be available until the early 2020s, but a number of early releases have been foreseen, based on increasingly longer stretches of observations.
The first Gaia data release, which will be available online on 14 September, will include the positions and G magnitude for about one billion stars using observations taken between 25 July 2014 and 16 September 2015.
In addition, for a subset of data – about 2 million stars in common between the Tycho-2 Catalogue and Gaia – there will be a five-parameter astrometric solution, giving the positions, parallaxes, and proper motions for those objects. This is referred to as the Tycho-Gaia Astrometric Solution (TGAS).
Photometric data for RR Lyrae and Cepheid variable stars that were observed frequently during a special scanning mode that repeatedly covered the ecliptic poles will also be made public.
The announcement of the date for this first Gaia data release was made today by Anthony Brown, Chair of the Gaia Data Processing and Analysis Consortium (DPAC) Executive, during the GREAT Network Science Symposium at the European Week of Astronomy and Space Science held in Athens, Greece. DPAC is a large pan-European team of expert scientists and software developers, including a contribution from ESA, that has been given the task of preparing for and producing the Gaia catalogues.
ICCUB participation in the Gaia mission
The Gaia UB team is composed by researchers from the Institute of Cosmos Sciences of the University of Barcelona (ICCUB), the Institute of Space Studies of Catalonia (IEEC). The team has been involved in the Gaia mission since the very early phases. It has played a major role in the scientific and technological design of the instrumentation, database prototypes and data simulation. It has also developed a calibration algorithm of photometric data, and the system that will enable to daily process satellite’s data and store them in a database to later extract the first scientific results.
Furthermore, the group is developing tools for scientific exploitation, by means of data got from the Earth in order to complement those provided by Gaia. The Data Processing Center of Barcelona, which includes CESCA and the Barcelona Supercomputer Center, provides resources to carry out some operations throughout the mission and has been a necessary tool to carry out simulations in order to test the instrument.
Gaia is designed to map more than 1 billion stars in our Galaxy, and to provide positions, parallaxes and proper motions at an unprecedented accuracy level, far below a milliarcsecond. These accuracies can only be achieved after a complex data processing that requires observations taken throughout the 5-year nominal mission. For this reason, the final Gaia results will not be available until the early 2020s, but a number of early releases have been foreseen, based on increasingly longer stretches of observations.
The first Gaia data release, which will be available online on 14 September, will include the positions and G magnitude for about one billion stars using observations taken between 25 July 2014 and 16 September 2015.
In addition, for a subset of data – about 2 million stars in common between the Tycho-2 Catalogue and Gaia – there will be a five-parameter astrometric solution, giving the positions, parallaxes, and proper motions for those objects. This is referred to as the Tycho-Gaia Astrometric Solution (TGAS).
Photometric data for RR Lyrae and Cepheid variable stars that were observed frequently during a special scanning mode that repeatedly covered the ecliptic poles will also be made public.
The announcement of the date for this first Gaia data release was made today by Anthony Brown, Chair of the Gaia Data Processing and Analysis Consortium (DPAC) Executive, during the GREAT Network Science Symposium at the European Week of Astronomy and Space Science held in Athens, Greece. DPAC is a large pan-European team of expert scientists and software developers, including a contribution from ESA, that has been given the task of preparing for and producing the Gaia catalogues.
ICCUB participation in the Gaia mission
The Gaia UB team is composed by researchers from the Institute of Cosmos Sciences of the University of Barcelona (ICCUB), the Institute of Space Studies of Catalonia (IEEC). The team has been involved in the Gaia mission since the very early phases. It has played a major role in the scientific and technological design of the instrumentation, database prototypes and data simulation. It has also developed a calibration algorithm of photometric data, and the system that will enable to daily process satellite’s data and store them in a database to later extract the first scientific results.
Furthermore, the group is developing tools for scientific exploitation, by means of data got from the Earth in order to complement those provided by Gaia. The Data Processing Center of Barcelona, which includes CESCA and the Barcelona Supercomputer Center, provides resources to carry out some operations throughout the mission and has been a necessary tool to carry out simulations in order to test the instrument.
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Gaia Data Release set for 14 September