Planck First Light Survey results confirm excellent performance

By Ben on September 17, 2009 at 1:47 pm | In Blog Posts | 1 Comment

fyi:

VERY COOL satellite.

“…Planck the coldest object in space at just 0.1° above absolute zero (-273.15°C)…”

–Ben

First Light Survey results confirm excellent performance

The Planck space observatory, ESA’s mission to study the early Universe, has successfully completed its initial test survey of the sky, confirming that both of the scientific instruments and the sophisticated cryogenics, all of which the UK played a key role in building, are working well. Following the successful survey, Planck has now embarked on its 15 month mission to map the structure of the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation (CMB) – the relic radiation from the Big Bang…

…The Planck satellite was launched along with the Herschel satellite on 14th May 2009 from Kourou, French Guiana, on an Ariane 5 rocket. During its 6 week journey to its observation point around L2, 1.5 million km (1 million miles) from Earth, the scientific instruments were cooled to extremely low temperatures, making Planck the coldest object in space at just 0.1° above absolute zero (-273.15°C). It took around 6 weeks for Planck to cool down to these low temperatures, after which a further 6 weeks were spent calibrating the instruments…

http://planck.cf.ac.uk/node/136