NEWS: 20130226: The 6th GREAT Plenary will be held during 10-12 July 2013 in Turku, Finland within the EAS European Week of Astronomy (EWASS 2013). Meeting details can be found on the Plenary pages.
NEWS: 20130226: The next set of GREAT workshops for 2013 have been announced - see the Science Meetings page.
Get involved by:
- taking part in GREAT sponsored meetings and events, or apply for funds to support your own networking activities.
- The GREAT wiki has links to the GREAT Working Groups and discussion areas. Sign up to the working groups there.
- The Announcement mailing list archive has general email announcements
- Read the GREAT ESF Programme Proposal to find out more.
Introduction to the GREAT Research Network Programme
GREAT is a pan European science driven research infrastructure which will facilitate, through focused interaction on a European scale, the fullest exploitation of the ESA Gaia 'cornerstone' astronomy mission, enabling the European astronomy community to provide answers to the key challenges in our understanding of the Galaxy and Universe.
Gaia is scheduled for launch in September 2013. It is designed to map over one billion stars with three instruments to collect astrometric, photometric and spectroscopic data on stars in the Milky Way and in galaxies belonging to the Local Group, distant galaxies, quasars and solar system objects. Gaia builds on the expertise established in Europe through the successful ESA Hipparcos mission.
GREAT is the programme which will bring together relevant scientific expertise by promoting topical workshops, training events, exchange visits, conferences and so forth with the aim of addressing the major scientific issues that the Gaia satellite will impact upon. This movie produced by ESA provides a nice summary of how Gaia will revolutionise our knowledge of the Milky Way and wider Universe.
GREAT Network Science Areas
GREAT provides support through its European Science Foundation Research Networking Programme for a wide range of community proposed events covering the key objective areas of the programme, largely focussed on gaining a deeper understanding of our Milky Way.These key topic areas are:
• Origin, structure, and evolution of the Milky Way
• Stellar astrophysics
• Galactic Dynamics
• Galactic Archaeology
• Star Formation and evolution
• Fundamental physics and the Reference Frame
• Extrasolar planets
• Binary Stars
• The Solar system
• The IT Data Challenge from Gaia
In addition, through the lifetime of the programme, specific areas for prioritisation maybe highlighted, as reported at the GREAT plenary meetings.
GREAT Funding Providers
The GREAT ESF programme is supported by the European Science Foundation through the GREAT Research Network Programme. This programme runs Feb 2010 to Feb 2015. In addition the related GREAT ITN (Initial Training Network) programme is supported by the EC through its FP7 Marie Curie programme under grant agreement 264895.
Page revised: 10 April 2013 by NAW