The Milky Way Unravelled by GREAT:
an international conference
GREAT ITN Final Conference
Barcelona (Spain) 1 - 5 December 2014
This is the last full conference of the GREAT-ITN network.
Rationale
GREAT is a pan European science driven research infrastructure which is facilitating, through focused interaction on a European scale, the fullest exploitation of the ESA Gaia 'cornerstone' astronomy mission. GREAT enables the European astronomy community to address key challenges in our understanding of the Galaxy and Universe.
Two productive networks have been operated since 2010: GREAT-ESF (European Science Foundation, 2010-2015) and the FP7-GREAT-ITN (EC, 2011-2015).
After the successful launch of the Gaia satellite in December 19th, 2013 and the complex commissioning phase, the mission starts five years nominal operations in summer 2014. At the time of this full conference
the expected scientific performances in terms of astrometry, photometry and spectroscopy will be established.
Around 200 European researchers will join in Barcelona to present the work carried out on the networks and
the science goals achieved up to now towards an optimal exploitation of Gaia data. This will be the time to evaluate the new scientific performance assessments for Gaia and to present the
Gaia-ESO Survey First Science. Next steps both on European networking strategy and on future milestones for the highly demanding on-group spectroscopic surveys will be critically examined.
The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Community's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement n° 264895