Preparations for the ATLAS Heavy Ion Program at the LHC

The ATLAS experiment will be taking data in the expected Pb+Pb run in late 2010. ATLAS is a hermetic detector, consisting of layers of charged particle tracking, highly segmented calorimetry and a precise muon tracking system. While designed primarily for proton-proton collisions, it has also been shown to perform well in the high multiplicity heavy ion environment. The expected performance for global variables, fully-reconstructed jets, quarkonia and tagged photons will be discussed, in the context of measurements made in proton-proton collisions at CM energies of 900 GeV and 7 TeV.