Cosmic Background Explorer
From Slackerpedia Galactica
The Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite was a NASA project to study the cosmic microwave background in greater detail than was previously possible. It had three instruments aboard to do two things: take the temperature of the microwave background to determine its temperature, and see how uniform this temperature was across the sky. Although it was suspected since the late 1960s that the microwave background spectrum was a blackbody, COBE proved it and pretty much closed, locked, and welded shut the door on the possibility of it being anything else. For that, mission PIs John Mather and George Smoot won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2006.
COBE was launched in November of 1989, and collected data for about a year until it ran out of the liquid helium required to keep its detectors cold. In addition to checking the universe's temperature, COBE also measured its anisotropy -- how different the temperature is from one point to another on the sky. The irregularities in temperature from place to place are measured in microkelvins, but still indicate the early universe was not completely uniform at the time matter and energy largely decoupled about 300,000 years after The Big Bang. Maps of these irregularities were occasionally touted as being the Fingerprints of (or Face of) God in the popular press, since they are essentially a blueprint for the shape of everything.
