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Backgrounder

The Planck Space Telescope

The Planck Space Telescope will be the European Space Agency's first mission to study the Cosmic Microwave Background-the relic radiation from the Big Bang. Planck will measure tiny fluctuations in the Cosmic Microwave Background with unprecedented accuracy, providing the sharpest picture ever of the young Universe when it was only 380 000 years old, and zeroing-in on theories that describe its birth and evolution. The mission's objective is to help answer some fundamental questions of modern science: How was the Universe formed? How has it evolved to its present form? And what shape will it take in the future? Scientists thereby hope to establish which theory best explains the origin of all cosmic structures.

Planck is scheduled to be launched on May 14, 2009, from Kourou, French Guiana, on board the same Ariane 5 rocket that will carry the Herschel Space Observatory. The satellite will be deployed about 1.5 million kilometres from Earth where it will orbit around the second Lagrange point L2 (a stable point in space). This is one of five areas distant from the Earth where the effects of gravity are nearly eliminated, allowing the telescope to float and manoeuvre with minimal interference. Planck originated from two earlier missions with similar science goals and was renamed in honour of German physicist Max Planck (founder of quantum theory and winner of the 1918 Nobel Prize in Physics).

Planck is equipped with a powerful telescope and two instruments operating at radio to sub-millimetre wavelengths. The 1.5-metre telescope will focus radiation from the sky onto two arrays of sensitive radio detectors: the Low Frequency Instrument and the High Frequency Instrument. Together they will measure the temperature of the Cosmic Microwave Background over the sky, searching for regions that are slightly warmer or colder than the average. The LFI and the HFI will complement each other to analyze the light gathered during the two complete microwave surveys of the sky. Routine observations are planned to last 15 months (enough to survey the whole sky twice over); a mission extension of about one year is possible.

The two cameras will cover different areas of the light spectrum. The LFI will operate like a transistor radio and the HFI will convert the electromagnetic radiation into heat for subsequent analysis. A sophisticated cryogenic system keeps their detectors at temperatures close to absolute zero.

Canada's Contribution

Canada joins an international consortium lead by the European Space Agency for the Planck Space Telescope. The Canadian Space Agency's investment of $4 million will allow Canadian researchers to join the teams of scientists who will spend years analyzing the data and answering fundamental questions about cosmic origins.

Canada contributed to both the LFI and HFI, the two instruments on Planck, mainly through development of sophisticated analysis software for studying the complex data streams from the satellite. The software was designed in parallel by the University of British Columbia for LFI and the University of Toronto for HFI, both funded by the Canadian Space Agency.

Professor Douglas Scott of the University of British Columbia is leading the Canadian LFI team. The HFI team is led by Professor J. Richard Bond of the University of Toronto. The Canadian teams have spent more than a decade working with their international colleagues to plan for the Planck mission, and will be directly involved in using the data to answer some of the biggest questions in the Universe.

For more information about Canada's contribution, visit:

www.asc-csa.gc.ca/eng/satellites/planck.asp