Introduction to GREAT
GREAT is a pan European science driven research infrastructure which will facilitate, through focused interaction on a European scale, the fullest exploitation of the ESA Gaia 'cornerstone' astronomy mission, enabling the European astronomy community to provide answers to the key challenges in our understanding of the Galaxy and Universe.
Gaia is scheduled for launch in late 2011. It is designed to map over one billion stars with three instruments to collect astrometric, photometric and spectroscopic data on stars in the Milky Way and in galaxies belonging to the Local Group, distant galaxies, quasars and solar system objects. Gaia builds on the expertise established in Europe through the successful ESA Hipparcos mission. A broad community of nearly 400 European scientists and engineers are working together to prepare and carry out the extremely challenging mission data processing.
GREAT is the programme which will bring together relevant scientific expertise by promoting topical workshops, training events, exchange visits, conferences and so forth with the aim of addressing the major scientific issues that the Gaia satellite will impact upon. This movie produced by ESA provides a nice summary of how Gaia will revolutionise our knowledge of the Milky Way and wider Universe.
The GREAT initiative is now enabled through our European Science Foundation (ESF) research networking programme which runs from Feb 2010 to Feb 2015. This network will fund community training events, workshops and major conferences, proceedings, grants for short and exchange visits, and outreach material. It will help build essential collaborative scientific cooperation across Europe and the wider world in turn delivering major advances in science around the main objectives of Gaia. Over 550 researchers in some 90 groups from 17 European countries and the European Space Agency (ESA), and covering all the science areas covered by Gaia have committed to participating in this network.
In addition a recent proposal has also been submitted to the EU Seventh Research Framework Programme (FP7) in order to support an Initial Training Network which would provide training to a core of early stage researchers,able to participate in the development of the GREAT programme and future scientific exploitation of Gaia. Further details of this will be announced here.
The GREAT wiki has links to the GREAT Working Groups and discussion areas. The Announcement mailing list archive has general email announcements
Read the Programme Proposal to find out more.
NEWS: 20100127: The next GREAT Plenary meeting will take place at ESA, ESTEC - Tues 29 - Weds 30 June 2010.
NEWS: 20091231: The GREAT ESF Research Networking Programme has been approved and will officially launch in Feb 2010.
NEWS: 20091231: In the near future the first of the open calls for workshops will be issued. Please check the Participation pages for full details.
