In 1989, the satellite Hipparcos was launched primarily for obtaining improved parallaxes and proper motions for over 100,000 nearby stars, increasing the reach of the method tenfold. Even so, Hipparcos was only able to measure parallax angles for stars up to about 1,600 light-years away, a little more than one percent of the diameter of the Milky Way Galaxy. The European Space Agency 's Gaia mission, launched in December 2013, can measure parallax angles to an accuracy of 10 microarcseconds, thus mapping nearby stars (and potentially planets) up to a distance of tens of thousands of light-years from Earth. In April 2014, NASA astronomers reported that the Hubble Space Telescope, by using spatial scanning, can precisely measure distances up to 10,000 light-years away, a ten-fold improvement over earlier measurements.