Galactic science has entered a new era with the launch of the Gaia satellite in 2013. Gaia is a European Space Agency cornerstone mission to map the billion brightest objects in the sky. Over five years, Gaia will provide precision distances and kinematics, photometry and spectrophotometry with stellar parameters for all objects. Radial velocities will be determined from spectra for the 60 million brightest stars.
From the first data release later this year, Gaia's measurements will spur major advances in fields ranging from stellar evolution and Galactic formation and evolution to fundamental physics and cosmology. The first science with Gaia has come from its detections of photometric transients which are already being released in near real time.
In this presentation, I will give an overview of the mission and its first science results. I will also discuss what we can expect in the first, and later, Gaia data releases in terms of products and precision.