Media representatives are invited to a briefing on the second data release of ESA's Gaia mission, an astrometry mission to map more than one billion stars in our Galaxy, the Milky Way.

The media briefing is being organised by ESA at the ILA Berlin Air and Space Show in Germany, on Wednesday 25 April 2018, 11:00–12:15 CEST. The show opens at 10:00 CEST.

Launched in December 2013, Gaia is destined to create the most accurate map yet of the Milky Way. By making high-precision measurements of the positions and motions of stars in the Milky Way, it will answer questions about the origin and evolution of our home galaxy.

The first data release in 2016, which contained positions of more than one billion stars plus distances and motions of a subset of two million, has already generated hundreds of scientific publications. The second data release is taking the census of our Galaxy to an entirely new level, including three-dimensional positions and two-dimensional motions of more than 1.3 billion stars, as well as their brightnesses and colours.

The media briefing will showcase the content of the data release and will highlight examples of the science that will be possible.