  The NA61/SHINE experiment at the CERN SPS aims to discover the critical point
of strongly interacting matter and study properties of the onset of
deconfinement. These goals will be reached by measurements of hadron production
properties in nucleus-nucleus, proton-proton and proton-lead interactions as a
function of collision energy and size of the colliding nuclei. Furthermore,
NA61/SHINE will perform numerous precision measurements needed for neutrino
(T2K) and cosmic-ray (Pierre Auger Observatory and KASCADE) experiments. This
paper summarizes physics arguments for the NA61/SHINE ion program and presents
the status and plans of the experiment.
