MINERνA is a neutrino scattering experiment at the NuMI beamline of FNAL, which began data taking in fall 2009. MINERνA is a high resolution, fully active detector designed to study the interaction of neutrinos with nuclei. The active volume of the detector consists of 3 tons of plastic scintillator. In addition, targets of 4 He, C, H 2 O, Fe, and Pb will allow detailed studies of the A dependence of neutrino cross sections. Some of the objectives of MINERνA are to measure the axial form factor

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... of the neutron with unprecedented precision, measure nuclear shadowing of F 2 and compare with muon scattering, study quark-hadron duality with neutrino scattering in comparison with electron scattering, and measure coherent pion production. We present an overview of the physics objectives, estimated uncertainties of the measurements, along with a description of the detector and a sample of the first measurements.