Planck Surveyor
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| Planck Surveyor | |
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| Organization: | ESA |
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| Wavelength: | Cosmic Microwave (CMB) |
| Location: | 1.5×106 km from Earth (L2 Lagrangian point) |
| Launched: | (31 July 2008) |
The Planck Surveyor is the third Medium-Sized Mission (M3) of ESA's Horizon 2000 Scientific Programme. It is designed to image the anisotropies of the Cosmic microwave background Radiation over the whole sky, with unprecedented sensitivity at high angular resolution. Planck will provide a major source of information relevant to several cosmological and astrophysical issues, such as testing theories of the early universe and the origin of cosmic structure. Planck was formerly called COBRAS/SAMBA. After the mission was selected and approved, it was renamed in honor of the German scientist Max Planck (1858-1947), Nobel Prize for Physics in 1918.
Planck is to be launched in 2008 aboard an Ariane 5 rocket together with the Herschel Space Observatory satellite. The mission will be a collaboration with NASA, and will complement the WMAP probe which measured larger-scale fluctuations.
[edit] External links
- PLANCK Surveyor (formerly COBRAS/SAMBA) on the internet
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