Far-red spectroscopy of peculiar stars and the GAIA mission

The coming GAIA Cornerstone mission by ESA will provide micro-arcsec astrometry, 10 bands photometry and far-red spectroscopy for a huge number of stars in the Galaxy (10^9). GAIA spectroscopy will cover the range 8480–8740 Ang, which includes the CaII triplet and the head of the Paschen series. In this paper we address the diagnostic potential of this wavelength range toward detection and characterization of peculiar stars.