The Gaia data set includes the spacecraft's first spectrographic information on asteroids.
in that, rather than selecting an object or group of objects and studying them intensely, Gaia charts the entire sky, making repeated observations.
"When we observe an asteroid, we look at its motion relative to the background stars to determine its trajectory and predict where it will be in the future," Marco Micheli, a scientist at the European Space Agency's Near-Earth Objects Coordination Centre, said in."This means that the more accurately we know the positions of the stars, the more reliably we can determine the orbit of an asteroid passing in front of them.
Astrometry conducted by Gaia differs from the conventional computation of an asteroid's orbit that assumes the object to be point-like without a specific shape, thus does not factor in size, rotation, surface-light-scattering properties, and the actual real-life shape of the asteroid.
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