The Big Foto

Planck was selected as the third Medium-Sized Mission (M3) of ESA’s Horizon 2000 Scientific Programme, and is today part of its Cosmic Vision Programme. It is designed to image the anisotropies of the Cosmic Background Radiation Field over the whole sky, with unprecedented sensitivity and 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 (in late 1996), it was renamed in honor of the German scientist Max Planck (1858-1947), Nobel Prize for Physics in 1918.

The Mission
Planck was launched on 14 May 2009 together with the Herschel satellite. After 50 days, as foreseen, Planck entered its final orbit around the Second Lagrangian point of the Sun–Earth system (L2), at a distance of 1.5 million kilometers from Earth. Since the end of the commissioning and performance verification phases in mid-August 2009, Planck has been performing its planned mission. On 15th January 2010, ESA’s advisory bodies approved an extension of Planck operations by 12 months. Planck is now scheduled to continuously acquire high-quality science data until the end of 2011.

1 The Plank one-year all-sky survey Credit: ESA, HFI and LFI #

2 Previous releases in context. Credit: ESA, HFI and LFI #

3 Planck image of a region in the constellation Perseus Credit: ESA/LFI & HFI Consortia #

4 Planck image of a region in the Orion Nebula. Credit: ESA/LFI & HFI Consortia #

5 Dust structures within 500 light-years of the Sun. Credit: ESA and the HFI Consortium, IRAS. #