  Asteroseismology has started to provide constraints on stellar properties
that will be essential to accurately reconstruct the history of the Milky Way.
Here we look at the information content in data sets representing current and
future space missions (CoRoT, Kepler, K2, TESS, and PLATO) for red giant stars.
We describe techniques for extracting the information in the frequency power
spectrum and apply these techniques to {\it Kepler} data sets of different
observing length to represent the different space missions. We demonstrate that
for KIC 12008916, a low-luminosity red giant branch star, we can extract useful
information from all data sets, and for all but the shortest data set we obtain
good constraint on the g-mode period spacing and core rotation rates. We
discuss how the high precision in these parameters will constrain the stellar
properties of stellar radius, distance, mass and age. We show that high
precision can be achieved in mass and hence age when values of the g-mode
period spacing are available. We caution that tests to establish the accuracy
of asteroseismic masses and ages are still "work in progress".
