CERN Accelerating science

The AWAKE project at CERN was approved in August 2013 and since then a big effort was made to be able to probe the acceleration of electrons before the "2019-2020 Long Shutdown". The next steps in this challenging schedule will be a dry run of all the beam line systems, at the end of the HW commissioning in June 2016, and the first proton beam sent to the plasma cell one month later. The current status of the project is presented together with an outlook over the foreseen works for operation with electrons in 2018.