Extra: Data & Discoveries from ESA's Gaia Mission

This podcast extra episode comes from this year's Big Bang Fair and Jeni & Paul grabbed an interview with a Gaia mission data scientist to talk data and the efforts taken in the less-glamorous, but absolutely critical, background to provide us with the discoveries and refinements we crave from the European Space Agency's latest space-based astrometry mission.

So while Paul and Jeni were there as the Sirius Space Agency explaining the science behind a mission into space on the Star Stage, they spoke to a post-doctoral researcher at Cambridge University's Data Processing Centre for the Gaia Mission.

In this interview we bring you:

• the timelines to data capture, recovery, capture and analysis
• the rapid pulication of results from Gaia data
• a surprising discovery about the Milky Way's satellite galaxies - the Magellanic Clouds
• a new star cluster found hiding behind a star