Gaia

The ESA mission Gaia not only observes a good fraction of the stars in the milky way, but also a huge number of asteroids. Gaia Data Release 2 (DR2) is the first data release to include a number of asteroid observations, limited to G magnitudes (no color information) and a pre-selected sample of 14099 asteroids from different populations. For each asteroids, DR2 contains a median number of 9 observations over the first 9 months of the mission. While this limited data set does not allow for deriving the targets’ rotational periods or constraining their taxonomic types, it is useful for a look into the shape distribution of asteroids. ...