A review of the Gaia mission and its science performance after one year of
operations will be presented, and the contribution to reconstructing the
history of the Milky Way will be outlined.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures. To appear in Astronomische Nachrichten, special
issue "Reconstructing the Milky Way's History: Spectroscopic Surveys,
Asteroseismology and Chemodynamical Models", Guest Editors C. Chiappini, J.
Montalban, and M. Steffen, AN 2016 (in press
