Sad to see this end but a huge legacy with more than 2000 peer reviewed paper coming from it every year COSMOS Gaia Publications in Peer-Reviewed Journals – Gaia – Cosmos
https://www.esa.int/Enabling_Support/Operations/Farewell_Gaia!_Spacecraft_operations_come_to_an_end
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I love this bit
> “Switching off a spacecraft at the end of its mission sounds like a simple enough job,” says Gaia Spacecraft Operator Tiago Nogueira. “But spacecraft really don’t want to be switched off.”
> “Gaia was designed to withstand failures such as radiation storms, micrometeorite impacts or a loss of communication with Earth. It has multiple redundant systems that ensured it could always reboot and resume operations in the event of disruption.”
> “We had to design a decommissioning strategy that involved systematically picking apart and disabling the layers of redundancy that have safeguarded Gaia for so long, because we don’t want it to reactivate in the future and begin transmitting again if its solar panels find sunlight.”
Inside Gaia is a John Wick-style fight for survival from the evil that wants to shut it down.
> “Today, I was in charge of corrupting Gaia’s processor modules to make sure that the onboard software will never restart again once we have switched off the spacecraft,” says Spacecraft Operations Engineer, Julia Fortuno.
RIP Gaia.