Abstract

The ESA Gaia mission, with the goal of producing the most precise 3-d map of the Milky Way ever  attempted, will ultimate revolutionize the field of Galactic astronomy. It will map the positions and velocities for more than 1 billion stars. It will also yield stellar characterization for a large fraction for those stars. Excitingly, its first data release was in Sept. 2016 and its next 
data release will be in April 2018. In this talk, I will outline the Gaia mission, some of its scientific accomplishments thus far, and what we hope to do with the newest data coming out in just 5 months.