Asteroid spectroscopy with Gaia

The Gaia space mission of the European Space Agency (ESA) will survey the entire sky with a limiting magnitude of about 20 in the V-band. Gaia is expected to be launched in the summer of 2013. Gaia will also observe about 400,000 asteroids, for which high precision astrometry and photometry will be obtained. Here we discuss Gaia spectrophotometric observations of asteroids, the methods for the treatment of the data, the expected performances of the spectrophotometers and the spectral classification of asteroids. We estimate that a robust spectral classification can be obtained for at least 100,000 asteroids from the low-resolution spectra obtained by Gaia.