Gaia Data Release 1, Pre-processing and source list creation
C. Fabricius, U. Bastian, J. Portell, others

TL;DR
The paper details the initial data processing, source list creation, and health monitoring for Gaia Data Release 1, highlighting methods, challenges, and the scale of data management involved.
Contribution
It introduces the comprehensive software systems and procedures developed for Gaia's initial data treatment, including source detection, catalog construction, and payload health monitoring.
Findings
Successful creation of a source list with new entries and removal of spurious detections.
Processing of approximately 50 million focal plane transits daily.
Effective daily monitoring of Gaia's instrument health.
Abstract
The first data release from the Gaia mission contains accurate positions and magnitudes for more than a billion sources, and proper motions and parallaxes for the majority of the 2.5~million Hipparcos and Tycho-2 stars. We describe three essential elements of the initial data treatment leading to this catalogue: the image analysis, the construction of a source list, and the near real-time monitoring of the payload health. We also discuss some weak points that set limitations for the attainable precision at the present stage of the mission. Image parameters for point sources are derived from one-dimensional scans, using a maximum likelihood method, under the assumption of a line spread function constant in time, and a complete modelling of bias and background. These conditions are, however, not completely fulfilled. The Gaia source list is built starting from a large ground-based…
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Taxonomy
TopicsStellar, planetary, and galactic studies · Astronomy and Astrophysical Research · Gamma-ray bursts and supernovae
