1.1.1 Introduction and overview

Author(s): Jos de Bruijne

This is the user documentation of Gaia Data Release 3 (Gaia DR3; click here for the full pdf version of this documentation). This documentation, in combination with the Gaia DR3 data processing papers published in the Special Issue of A&A, describes how the raw data collected by the Gaia spacecraft have been converted to the data products that form this release. Gaia Collaboration et al. (2023j) provides an overview of the contents of Gaia DR3 and a guide for the use of the data while Gaia Collaboration et al. (2016b) describes the Gaia mission. Detailed guidelines for how to deal with parallaxes and astrometric data in general are given by Luri et al. (2018). Babusiaux et al. (2023) describes the overall validation of the Gaia DR3 data. The data itself, as well as services such as cross-matches and visualisation tools, are available from the Gaia ESA Archive (GEA) at https://archives.esac.esa.int/gaia. The Gaia DR3 data model is described in Chapter 20 of this documentation. Credit and citation instructions can be found here. The Gaia mission home page is https://www.cosmos.esa.int/gaia/. Further, detailed information on the Gaia mission, the spacecraft, its operations, the science data, its processing, and the validation of the processed products are described in this documentation.