NA61/SHINE at the CERN SPS: plans, status and first results

The NA61/SHINE experiment aims to discover the critical point of strongly interacting matter and study properties of the onset of deconfinement. It also to performs precise hadron production measurements for the neutrino and cosmic rays experiments. These goals will be achieved by measurements of hadron production properties in nucleus-nucleus, proton-proton and proton-nucleus interactions as a function of collision energy and size of the colliding nuclei, as well as pion-nucleus interactions. This contribution summarises the arguments of the ion program as well as presents the first physics results of the NA61 experiment.