Greatgaia is a community driven initiative to ensure the Gaia mission’s data will be fully utilized upon release. This goal will be reached by engaging science driven research communities that will use Gaia data, as well as informing the general public of what Gaia can bring them.
Gaia (Gaea) was the Earth goddess and one of the primordial deities in Greek mythology. She is credited with creating life on our planet, balancing its cycles, and keeping harmony among its various ecosystems. Gaia gave birth to all heavenly gods through her union with Ouranos/Uranus in the sky, sea-gods through Pontus, and Giants from her union with Dark Pit God Tartaros in Tartaros’ Underworld.
The GENIUS project has assisted with the establishment of server-side infrastructure at ESAC for Gaia archive at ESAC and Virtual Observatory compliant user interfaces, and also assisted the Gaia team with long-term archiving and processing activities.
GENIUS has also taken an active part in outreach, increasing its visibility amongst professional communities, educational institutions and the general public.
GENIUS has also helped facilitate extended proposals of collaboration between Gaia and JASMINE suite (nano-Jasmine, small-Jasmine and JAsmine). The project made contributions towards defining requirements for an advanced access facility (BEANS) designed to compare Galaxy models against full catalogue contents; BEANS will likely become integrated into GDAF system which will become part of Gaia DR1 archive implementation and may eventually be utilized by other ESA data centres.