Scientific and Computer Engineering Center (SCEC)

The Scientific and Computer Engineering Center (PISI)

is a skills center aiming to contribute to the various scientific or software engineering themes necessary for major projects, soil or space, in the discipline. He contributes in particular to the Data Reduction Software (DRS) of large spectrographs (like MOSAIC) and to the ground segment of large space projects (like Gaia).

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Gaia is the European space mission whose objective is to map the sky with an unprecedented precision of a few millionths of an arcsecond and a depth of up to magnitude 21. The PISI is responsible for two "Units of Coordination” of Gaia, and plays a key role in this project by coordinating the work of respectively 50 and 30 European scientists and engineers. The first three published star catalogs, including nearly 2 billion sources, have already enabled more than 12. 000 publications and important discoveries about our Galaxy, the solar system and nearby galaxies.