The year 2010 has been the first year of steady operation of the CERN Large Hadron Collider. The ATLAS experiment has recorded a large number of proton-proton collisions (equivalent to an integrated luminosity of 40 pb-1) at an unprecedented center of mass energy of 7 TeV. In addition several millions Pb-Pb collisions at a center of mass energy of 2.76 TeV/nucleon were collected in the last months of 2010. In this first year most standard model particles have been “rediscovered”. Limits on new physics in several areas, such as supersymmetry, quark compositeness and new heavy gauge bosons have been improved from earlier particle accelerators. A selection of new results and the prospects for 2011 are presented.