William Atkins
Wednesday, 06 May 2009 19:58
Science -
Space
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PLANCK
Planck, also coordinated by the ESA, will have as its primary goal to look at the very early Universe, at a time when it was only about 400,000 years old. We now think the Universe is about 13.7 billion years old.
It was previously called COBRAS/SAMBA for: COsmic Background Radiation
Anisotropy Satellite and SAellite for Measurement of Background
Anisotropies.
The fifteen-month-plus mission will explore the glow of radiation that was created by the Big Bang, the theorized beginning of our Universe.
This glow of radiation is called the cosmic microwave background (CMB), which is the light (electromagnetic radiation) from the particles that came about when the Big Bang occurred and then evolved over 13.7 billion years to produce the Universe we know today.
Charles Lawrence, NASA project scientist for Planck, states,
“The cosmic microwave background shows us the universe directly at age 400,000 years, not the movie, not the historical novel, but the original photons. Planck will give us the clearest view ever of this baby universe, showing us the results of physical processes in the first brief moments after the Big Bang, and the starting point for the formation of stars and galaxies." [NASA]
The Planck probe will record temperature changes in the CMB radiation over a large range of radio and microwave wavelengths. Its very precise instruments will be able to mark changes of temperature as tiny as one millionth of a Kelvin.
The Planck probe, which was named after German physicist Max Planck, the founder of quantum theory, will have onboard a 1.5-meter telescope and two instruments. One instrument, the High Frequency Instrument (HFI), consists of 52 bolometers, which will record m icrowaves between the frequencies of 100 and 857 gigahertz (GHz).
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