"The final commands have been sent to Gaia. This is the last time that the spacecraft will ever hear from its team on Earth," The ESA said. Those final commands included shutting down ...

But recently astronomers have used data collected by the European Space Agency’s Gaia spacecraft to detect three previously unknown black holes and, it turns out, are the closest known to Earth.

Europe's Gaia space telescope was powered down and sent into "retirement" on Thursday after a decade revealing the secrets of the Milky Way, but its observations will fuel discoveries for decades ...

Gaia has been peering into the universe from a stable orbit 1.5 million kilometers (930,000 miles) from Earth called the second Lagrange point. But the neighborhood has been getting more crowded ...

Related: Goodnight, Gaia! ESA spacecraft shuts down after 12 years of Milky Way mapping For example, the team needed to move the probe from its science orbit at the Earth-Sun Lagrange Point 2 ...