We present the first data release of the Radial Velocity Experiment (RAVE),
an ambitious spectroscopic survey to measure radial velocities and stellar
atmosphere parameters (temperature, metallicity, surface gravity) of up to one
million stars using the 6dF multi-object spectrograph on the 1.2-m UK Schmidt
Telescope of the Anglo-Australian Observatory (AAO). The RAVE program started
in 2003, obtaining medium resolution spectra (median R=7,500) in the Ca-triplet
region ($\lambda\lambda$ 8,410--8,795 \AA) for southern hemisphere stars drawn
from the Tycho-2 and SuperCOSMOS catalogs, in the magnitude range 9
