Martin Altmann
Less than a year before launch of the Gaia satellite, the team of about 400 scientists who will conduct the mission are working hard to finish the pre-launch-preparations. Gaia will obtain astrometric and photometric measurements of ~1 billion stars up to 20th magnitude, and will additionally record spectroscopy for a brighter subset of ~100 million objects - thus creating a 6-dimensional picture of our Milky Way and its immediate surroundings. I will present the scientific motivation and prospects of this undertaking, show the spacecraft involved and its capabilities and components, the current status of the mission and the timetable. Finally I will describe GBOT, the "Ground Based Optical Tracking" project, which will help Gaia reach its ambitious aims.