Gaia
Nice couple papers. First one disses the data collection and reduction methodologies and the second presents the improved results. Nice way to milk more than one paper from all the hard work!
As mentioned, ESA is conducting the wicked cool Gaia Mission as a Hipp follow on. Gaia will measure all the properties, distance, proper mostion, spectrum of a billion (thousand million) stars down to Mv=20! Gotta wait until 2011 or later for the launch though.