Abstract

The VISTA Variables in the Via Lactea is an ESO public survey that has been mapping the bulge and inner disk of the Milky Way in the near infrared for the past 6 years. Here we examine the scientific goals and some key results, as well as the legacy of the VVV survey. We also discuss the making of the first huge public image of the Galactic bulge, and how these data allowed us to measure directly the total bulge mass of the Milky Way bulge, that is twenty billion Solar masses. Finally, we present the plans of the recently approved VVVX, an extended survey of the Milky Way, that would map about 4% of the sky repeatedly in the near-IR, measuring more than 2 billion stars, producing a ~1 Petabyte database for the whole community to exploit.