Abstract
The Gaia astrometric satellite is in its science operational phase since July 2014. At an average rate of 50 million observations per day, Gaia scans the full sky once every six months. The first data release (Gaia DR1), issued in September 2016, contains astrometric and photometric results for more than 1 billion stars brighter than magnitude 21 based on observations acquired during the first 14 months of operations. For more than two million stars brighter than 11.5 mag, positions, parallaxes, and proper motions have been obtained to HIPPARCOS-type precision through a combination with the earlier HIPPARCOS and Tycho-2 positions. For the remaining stars, positions at epoch J2015.0 have been obtained by essentially neglecting their proper motions and parallaxes. Positions and proper motions are in the ICRF radio/ VLBI frame. We give an overview of the current status of the mission, the astrometric challenges, the Data Processing and Analysis Consortium operations, the validation processes, the contents of Gaia DR1, and the prospects for the coming releases. We emphasise that although Gaia DR1 data are based on provisional and incomplete calibrations of the instrument, the results represent a huge improvement in the available fundamental stellar data, and discuss some of the first results.
