Table of Contents

The Planck Space Telescope: Surveying the Sky

Planck is Europe's first mission to study the birth of the Universe. Planck was launched jointly with the Herschel Space Observatory aboard an Ariane 5 rocket, on May 14, 2009. The satellite is the most sensitive telescope ever designed to study the cosmic microwave background--the remnants of radiation from the Big Bang some 13 billion years ago. Planck's detectors measure the temperature of this light, searching for regions that are slightly warmer or colder than the average. These small fluctuations in temperature, called anisotropies, provided the seeds for the formation of galaxies that exist today.

Planck originated when two earlier missions with similar science goals (the Cosmic Background Radiation Anisotropy Satellite (COBRAS) and the Satellite for Measurement of Background Anisotropies (SAMBA)) merged. The COBRAS/SAMBA telescope was renamed Planck in honour of German physicist Max Planck (founder of quantum theory and winner of the 1918 Nobel Prize in Physics).

The Planck satellite will give astronomers a glimpse of conditions near the beginning of the Universe. 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.

Mapping the sky with Planck

Planck measures 4.2 metres high and has a primary mirror 1.5 metres in diameter. The satellite weighs 1900 kilograms. During the planned 15-month mission, the two instruments on Planck will receive and analyze the radiation captured by the mirror. The Low Frequency Instrument (LFI) and the High Frequency Instrument (HFI) will complement each other to analyze the light gathered during the two complete microwave surveys of the sky. These two cameras 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. The satellite is in orbit around the second Lagrange point (a stable point in space located 1.5 million kilometres from Earth) and is kept at a temperature approaching absolute zero.

Canada participated in the development of the LFI and HFI, the two instruments on Planck, mainly through development of the rapid interpretation software and the real-time analysis software that will make it possible to verify the data in the preliminary stages of the mission. The data analysis software for the LFI and HFI were developed in parallel by two teams, one at the University of British Columbia and one at the University of Toronto, 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.

• Launch kit for Ariane 5
• Planck Info-Card