Projects

The Planck mission will collect and characterize radiation from the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) using sensitive radio receivers operating at extremely low temperatures. These receivers will determine the black body equivalent temperature of the background radiation and will be capable of distinguishing temperature variations of about one microkelvin. These measurements will be used to produce the best ever maps of aniosotopies in the CMB radiation field.

Planck will provide a map of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) field at all angular resolutions greater than 10 arcminutes and with a temperature resolution of the order of one part in 10⁶. The simultaneous mapping of the sky at a wide range of frequencies will enable the separation of the Galactic and extragalactic foreground radiation from the primordial cosmological background signal.