Question: How do think your telescope will turn out?

Guy Rixon answered on 5 Mar 2018:

Gaia, the galaxy-mapper, is working well (apart from a transponder problem last month, now sorted). It should go on working for another few years. We expect to do everything that was planned for the mission except for the part that measures how fast the stars are moving toward or away from us. That instrument is blinded by scattered light so it can only see the brighter stars.

Plato, the planet finder: we don’t know yet. We think the spacecraft will work well. The flight and payload engineers are happy with how things are going. We know that if the spacecraft works we’ll find a lot of interesting planets. What we don’t know yet is if we’ll find any truly Earth-like planets, because we don’t know how many exist. Finding “Earth 2.0” is the prize.