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gaia data release 3 documentation

14 Validation

14.1 Introduction

Author(s): Claus Fabricius, Xavier Luri

This section summarises the results of the independent validation tests run by the Coordination Unit 9 (CU9) of DPAC on the Gaia DR3 data. It includes the tests already made for Gaia EDR3 for astrometry and photometry, with relevant updates, and adds new results for the many new data products appearing for the first time in Gaia DR3.

The tests described here are to a large extent complementary to the ones published in the validation papers (Fabricius et al. (2021), Babusiaux et al. (2023)) accompanying the early and the final Gaia DR3 releases. These papers provide a more concise overview of the validation findings as well as practical recommendations for the usage of the Gaia DR3 data.

In several cases the issues found during the validation campaign were repaired by reprocessing before the data release; these cases are not discussed here, since they are not of relevance for the published data. For the remaining cases we document the issue and in some cases give recommendations to mitigate them.

Gaia DR3 comprises several dozen tables. Some of them did not go through an independent validation beyond a very basic one. This applies to:

We also do not discuss the tables with non-single star solutions as all tests are included in Babusiaux et al. (2023). These systems are also discussed in Chapter 7.