# The Gaia Mission and Significance

## TL;DR

The paper reviews the Gaia space mission's objectives and achievements, highlighting its significant advancements in astrometry compared to historical surveys, and emphasizes its transformative impact on the field.

## Contribution

It provides a comprehensive assessment of Gaia DR2's achievements and contextualizes its progress within the history of sky surveys and parallax research.

## Key findings

- Gaia DR2 represents a major leap in astrometry.
- Compared to historical surveys, Gaia's data is significantly more precise.
- Gaia's advancements are more than incremental, indicating a paradigm shift.

## Abstract

I provide a summary of the ESA space astrometry mission Gaia regarding its main objectives and current status following the 2nd data release (Gaia DR2) in April 2018. The Gaia achievements in astrometry are assessed with a historical perspective by comparing the DR2 content to sky surveys or parallax searches over the last two centuries. One shows that Gaia sounds more like a big leap into a new world than an incremental progress in this field.