The Gaia space observatory is hoisted inside a mobile gantry on December 14, 2013 at Europe's Spaceport, French Guiana. Soyuz VS06 launched successfully five days later with the Gaia mission, its upper composite, intact. The mission will yield the most detailed three-dimensional map ever made of the Milky Way galaxy. Gaia will chart a billion stars (about 1% of the stars in our galaxy) using two telescopes and three scientific instruments. On September 14, 2016, the mission released its first set of data from a year of scanning the sky.