  On the 19th of December 2013, the Gaia spacecraft was successfully launched
by a Soyuz rocket from French Guiana and started its amazing journey to map and
characterise one billion celestial objects with its one billion pixel camera.
In this presentation, we briefly review the general aims of the mission and
describe what has happened since launch, including the Ecliptic Pole scanning
mode. We also focus especially on binary stars, starting with some basic
observational aspects, and then turning to the remarkable harvest that Gaia is
expected to yield for these objects.
