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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.