Gaia relies on the proven principles of ESA's Hipparcos mission to help solve one of the most difficult yet deeply fundamental challenges in modern astronomy: the creation of an extraordinarily precise three-dimensional map of about one billion stars throughout our Galaxy and beyond. This massive stellar census provides the basic observational data to tackle an enormous range of important problems related to the origin, structure, and evolutionary history of our Galaxy. The Gaia mission delivers an astronomical catalogue and data archive of unprecedented scope, accuracy and completeness. The Gaia satellite was launched at the end of 2013, this release contains the data collected by Gaia during the first 14 months, including astrometry and photometry for over 1 billion sources brighter than G magnitude 20.7.