Tasked with mapping one billion stars to unprecedented precision (to the tens of microarc-second level, comparable to the width of a coin on the Moon as viewed from Earth), ESA's Science cornerstone mission Gaia was launched on 19 December 2013. Mission operations are performed from ESA's Operations Centre (ESOC) in Germany, and after insertion into its operational Lissajous orbit around the Sun-Earth system Lagrange point two, plus completion of approximately six months of commissioning, Gaia has been operating in its routine science phase since July 2014. Following the first full sky survey it was observed that Gaia's Science return was larger than predicted and consequently there was a significant increase of data volume (circa 45%) to be downlinked. This was due to various factors, mainly Gaia's ability to observe stars fainter than the original magnitude 20 limit. In order to downlink this data in an efficient manner a stepwise approach was implemented involving taking unmanned ground station passes to downlink this extra science data. A simple solution using open loop automation was quickly implemented and gradually improved upon over time, adding robustness and closed loop functionality using ESA's automation software Matis. In addition, the desire to improve efficiency has been combined with the capabilities of Matis to allow daily tasks to be automated that would otherwise require the need of a dedicated person to be present on-console in the control room. This includes not only ground-based tasks such as checking for data archive completeness and requesting offline data retrievals to fill gaps, but also commanding of the on-board spacecraft subsystems to dump stored telemetry to ground and request reports of on-board anomalies. Matis is also used in combination with telemetry arriving from the ground station network using another piece of ESA software named LMS. Together they will be used to, amongst other things, monitor the power level from the spacecraft transponder and automatically stop the downlink of science data on-board to avoid science data loss. This paper describes the experience of the Gaia operations team in evolving from an almost exclusively manual operations environment to the large amount of automation in use today. The introduction of further automation tasks to improve efficiency, and their implications for system monitoring of multiple spacecraft covering the entire Astronomy division within ESOC, will also be discussed. Finally, the future extensions of automation concepts for Gaia and other flying and not-yet-flying ESA missions will be explored.

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