Readiness of the ATLAS Experiment for First Data

The ATLAS detector is one of the experiments at the LHC that will detect high-energy proton collisions at 14 TeV. The commissioning of the detector has started already in 2005 in parallel to the detector installation and is still in progress. The data taken so far corresponds to noise runs, cosmic muon events and beam background events from single beam in September 2008. We present the current status of the detector and performance results obtained during commissioning.Comment: 8 pages, 18 figures, to appear in the Proceedings of the XLIV Rencontres de Moriond, Electroweak Session, La Thuile, March 11, 200