On the gaia expected harvest on eclipsing binaries

The space experiment Gaia, the approved cornerstone 6 ESA mission, will observe up to a billion stars in our Galaxy and obtain their astrometric positions on a micro-arcsec level, multi-band photometry as well as spectroscopic observations. It is expected that about one million Eclipsing Binaries (EBs) (with V <= 16 mag) will be discovered and the observing fashion will be quite similar to Hipparcos/Tycho mission operational mode. The combined astrometric, photometric and spectroscopic data will be used to compute the physical parameters of the observed EBs. From a study of a small sample of EBs, it is shown that the agreement between the fundamental stellar parameters, derived from ground-based and Hipparcos (Gaia-like) observations, is more than satisfactory and the Gaia data will be suitable to obtain accurate binary solutions.