Parallel sessions

The ESA Gaia mission is creating a 3-D map of over two billion stars in our Milky Way and local Universe. The second Gaia Data Release was issued in April 2018 (http://www.cosmos.esa.int/web/gaia/dr2) , whilst the third release is currently on the horizon (http://www.cosmos.esa.int/web/gaia/release). This parallel session will provide a basic introduction to the Gaia mission, an overview of the catalogue contents including scientific quality and practical information on how to handle and access them from the Gaia archive for science research. The session will also look ahead as to what to expect from the third data release. The session will be of interest to PhD and early stage researchers.