Gaia Data Release 3

Gaia is a cornerstone mission in the science programme of the European Space Agency (ESA). The spacecraft construction was approved in 2006. Both the spacecraft and the payload were built by European industry. The involvement of the scientific community focusses on data processing for which the international Gaia Data Processing and Analysis Consortium (DPAC) was selected in 2007. Gaia was launched on 19 December 2013. The early third data release is based on 34 months of observations, and was issued on 13 June 2022. It contains the five-parameter astrometric solution - positions on the sky, parallaxes, and proper motions - for more than 1.4 billion sources, with a limiting magnitude of G = 21 and a bright limit of G ≈ 3. It also contains classification, astrophysical, and orbital parameters, as well as radial velocities for several tens to hundreds of millions of objects. The full description is given in https://www.cosmos.esa.int/web/gaia/dr3