The First Gaia Intermediate Data Release announced

The contents of the first Gaia Intermediate Data Release have been announced today (16 November 2015) at the Data Processing and Analysis Consortium (DPAC) plenary meeting. The intended release has three elements:

1. The sky positions and broad-band magnitudes of objects with single-star and good astrometric behaviour,
2. Photometric data of selected RR Lyrae and Cepheids from the high-cadence Ecliptic Pole Scanning law period, and
3. Astrometric parameters (positions, parallaxes and proper motions) based on the Tycho-Gaia Astrometric Solution (TGAS; A&A paper, arXiv preprint) for some 2 million objects in common between the Tycho-2 catalogue and Gaia.

The production run for these three elements is underway and is expected to be completed in early 2016. At that point in time a more precise release date will be decided and a validation exercise is started. Only successfully validated data will be released. Updates to the process, schedule and/or contents will be reported on the Data Release Scenario pages.