technique fell into disrepute. Unfortunately, changes in stellar position are so small—and atmospheric and systematic distortions so large—that even the best ground-based telescopes cannot produce precise enough measurements. All claims of a planetary companion of less than 0.1 solar mass, as the mass of the planet, made before 1996 using this method are likely spurious. In 2002, the Hubble Space Telescope did succeed in using astrometry to characterize a previously discovered planet around the star Gliese 876. The space-based observatory Gaia, launched in 2013, is expected to find thousands of planets via astrometry, but prior to the launch of Gaia, no planet detected by astrometry had been confirmed. SIM PlanetQuest was a US project (cancelled in 2010) that would have had similar exoplanet finding capabilities to Gaia. One potential advantage of the astrometric method is that it is most sensitive to planets with large orbits. This makes it complementary to other methods that are most sensitive to planets with small orbits. However, very long observation times will be required — years, and possibly decades, as planets far enough from their star to allow detection via astrometry also take a long time to complete an orbit. Planets orbiting around one of the stars in binary systems are more easily detectable, as they cause perturbations in the orbits of stars themselves. However, with this method, follow-up observations are needed to determine which star the planet orbits around. In 2009, the discovery of VB 10b by astrometry was announced. This planetary object, orbiting the low mass red dwarf star VB 10, was reported to have a mass seven times that of Jupiter. If confirmed, this would be the first exoplanet discovered by astrometry, of the many that have been claimed through the years. However recent radial velocity independent studies rule out the existence of the claimed planet. In 2010, six binary stars were astrometrically measured. One of the star systems, called HD 176051, was found with "high confidence" to have a planet. In 2018, a study comparing observations from the Gaia spacecraft to Hipparcos data for the Beta Pictoris system was able to measure the mass of Beta Pictoris b, constraining it to Jupiter masses. This is in good agreement with previous mass estimations of roughly 13 Jupiter masses. In 2019, data from the Gaia spacecraft and its predecessor Hipparcos was complemented with HARPS data enabling a better description of ε Indi Ab