The First Look of Gaia: Daily data quality and instrument health assessment with automated early warnings

TL;DR

The Gaia First Look system monitors daily data quality and instrument health for the Gaia mission, providing early warnings and insights into long-term trends to ensure consistent data quality over its extended operational period.

Contribution

This paper introduces the Gaia First Look system, a novel monitoring framework that uses limited astrometric solutions and diagnostic data for daily health assessment and early warning capabilities.

Findings

Identified long-term trends and effects impacting Gaia's data quality.

Reported potential issues to DPAC for further analysis.

Demonstrated the system's ability to provide early warnings and monitor satellite health.

Abstract

The ESA Gaia mission is a 10+ year astrometric whole-sky scan, demanding consistent data quality over the whole timespan of operations Aims. The Gaia First Look (FL) is a system whose aim is monitoring the data quality to identify problems, which includes early warning capabilities for potential upcoming issues. Methods. In order to achieve its goals, the Gaia FL implemented its own limited astrometric solution, and used the daily calibrations from other segments of the Data Processing and Analysis Consortium (DPAC), as well as the diagnostic data from the satellite itself, in order to obtain a complete picture of the situation of the Gaia satellite on a daily basis. This led to a short-term health and data quality check, but also to a broader overview of the longer-term trends and evolutions within the payload. Potential issues that were encountered were reported to other groups within DPAC for further analysis purposes. When required, ways to mitigate the problems were discussed, and implemented. Results. We show a number of findings by the Gaia FL concerning longer-term evolution, individual but common effects, as well as detrimental impacts, all of which occurred over the operational phase of the Gaia mission