The Gaia spacecraft took its final look at the stars in January. But its work is far from over. Its observations will be producing new discoveries for decades.

Above Earth’s blurring atmosphere, the space telescope kept a sharp eye on the heavens for more than a decade. It studied about two billion objects – mostly stars. It measured their temperature, composition, and motion. And it plotted their positions with amazing precision. That’s allowed astronomers to produce the best 3-D maps of the Milky Way Galaxy to date – by far.

Those maps have helped plot the origins of many stars – the remains of star clusters or even small galaxies pulled in by the Milky Way. And that’s revealed a lot more about the history of the entire galaxy.

Gaia also looked at other galaxies, at asteroids and comets in the solar system, and many other objects. It even helped reveal a couple of planets in other star systems.

The craft ran out of the gas it used to keep its telescope on target, bringing its mission to an end. But it takes a lot of time to process Gaia’s observations and release them for study. There have been three big batches so far, which have yielded more than 13,000 scientific papers. The next big release is scheduled for late next year. And the final release – everything Gaia saw and reported – won’t be ready until late 2030 at the earliest – a treasure trove that astronomers will be poking through for decades.

Script by Damond Benningfield