  An accurate determination of the top quark pair production cross section at
the LHC provides a valuable check of the Standard Model. Given the high
statistics which will be available (about one top quark pair per second, at a
luminosity of 10^33 cm^-2 s^-1), this check can be performed relatively fast
after the turn on of the LHC. The prospects for measuring the total top quark
pair cross section with the ATLAS detector during the initial period of LHC
running will be presented here. The cross section is determined in the single
lepton channel and in the dilepton channel.
