  RAVE, the RAdial Velocity Experiment, is an ambitious program to conduct a
survey to measure the radial velocities, metallicities and abundance ratios for
up to a million stars using the 1.2-m UK Schmidt Telescope of the
Anglo-Australian Observatory (AAO), over the period 2003 - 2010. The survey
represents a giant leap forward in our understanding of our own Milky Way
galaxy, providing a vast stellar kinematic database larger than any other
survey proposed for this coming decade. The main data product will be a
southern hemisphere survey of about a million stars. This survey would comprise
0.7 million thin disk main sequence stars, 250,000 thick disk stars, 100,000
bulge and halo stars, and a further 50,000 giant stars including some out to 10
kpc from the Sun. RAVE will offer the first truly representative inventory of
stellar radial velocities for all major components of the Galaxy. Here we
present the first scientific results of this survey as well as its second data
release which doubles the number of previously released radial velocities. For
the first time, the release also provides atmospheric parameters for a large
fraction of the 2nd year data making it an unprecedented tool to study the
formation of the Milky Way.
