Fact Sheet
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Planck is helping to provide answers to some of the most important questions in modern science: how did the Universe begin, how did it evolve to the state we observe today, and how will it continue to evolve in the future? Planck's objective is to analyse, with the highest accuracy ever achieved, the remnants of the radiation that filled the Universe immediately after the Big Bang - this we observe today as the Cosmic Microwave Background.
Mission Objectives
- Perform measurements of Cosmic Microwave Background anisotropies
- Test inflationary models of the early Universe
- Measure amplitude of structures in the Cosmic Microwave Background
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Perform measurements of Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect
Mission Name
Planck, originally named COBRAS/SAMBA, was renamed on approval of the mission in 1996 in honour of the German scientist Max Planck (1858-1947) who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1918. J.C. Mather and G.F. Smoot have received the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2006 for their discovery of the blackbody nature of the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation and the small-scale deviations from the blackbody curve.
Spacecraft
| Mass | About 1900 kg at launch |
| Dimensions | 4.2 m high, 4.2 m maximum diameter |
| Launcher | Ariane 5 ECA from Guiana Space Centre |
| Mission Lifetime | (Nominal) 15 months from end of Calibration and Performance Verification Phase; (Actual) almost 4.5 years |
| Wavelength | Microwave: 27 GHz to 1 Thz |
| Telescope | 1.9m × 1.5m primary mirror (1.5m projected aperture) |
Instruments
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HFI High Frequency Instrument |
Description |
83 GHz - 1 THz Array of 52 bolometric detectors, operated at 0.1K |
| Principal Investigator |
Jean-Loup Puget, Institut d'Astrophysique Spatiale (Orsay, France) |
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| Deputy Principal Investigator |
François Bouchet, Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris (Paris, France) |
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LFI Low Frequency Instrument |
Description |
27 - 77 GHz Array of 22 tuned radio receivers, operated at 20K |
| Principal Investigator |
Nazzareno Mandolesi, Istituto di Tecnologie e Studio delle Radiazioni Extraterrestri (Bologna, Italy) |
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| Deputy Principal Investigator |
Marco Bersanelli, Universita' degli Studi di Milano (Milan, Italy) |
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Orbit
Planck was launched on an Ariane 5 ECA rocket together with ESA's Herschel spacecraft on 14 May 2009, at 13:12 UTC.The two spacecraft separated after launch and were directly injected towards the second Lagrange point of the Sun-Earth system. On 3 July, following a few orbit correction manoeuvres, Planck reached its final operational orbit: a Lissajous orbit with an average amplitude of about 400 000 km around the L2 point at a distance of around 1.5 million km from Earth.
Operations Centre
The ground segment of Planck is composed of the Operations Ground Segment, comprising all the elements under the responsibility of the European Space Operations Centre (ESOC), which includes the Mission Operations Centre, the ground stations and the communications network, and the Scientific Ground Segment.
The Mission Operations Centre (MOC) was located at ESA's European Space Operations Centre (ESOC) in Darmstadt, Germany. For communication with the spacecraft ESA's 35-m deep-space antenna at New Norcia (close to Perth, Australia) was the prime ground station, and Cebreros (close to Avila, Spain) was the back-up.
The Scientific Ground Segment is distributed between the following centres: the Planck Science Office, which took care of the scheduling of the survey strategy, and the two instrument teams' Data Processing Centres and Instrument Operations Teams, responsible for each instrument to process the telemetry and monitor the instrument operations respectively.