PLANCK satellite

Looking in on these physics equations as a chemist, 1 am surprised in two different ways. First, the number of fundamental physical constants needed is surprisingly small. For example, the night sky still echoes with light from the Big Bang. The shape of this light can be described with just six numbers. In 2015, four years of data from the Planck satellite were processed and released, and only minor tweaks to those six numbers were needed to explain all that data. Those six numbers work very, very well. 

In 2015, four years of data from the Planck satellite. .. Links to all papers available at http //www.cosmos.esa.int/web/planck/publications under the heading Planck 2015 Results. A comprehensive summary for the general reader is by C. M. Carlisle, Planck upholds standard cosmology, published February 10,2015, at skyandtelescope.com. See also Martin Rees. Just Six Numbers. 2000, Basic Books. 

On the last three decades, several space experiments with parts at very low temperatures have been flown. Among these, we mention IRAS (Infrared Astronomical Satellite) launched in 1983 (see Fig. 14.1), COBE (Cosmic Background Explorer) launched in 1989, ISO (Infrared Space Observatory) launched in 1995 and Astro-E (X-ray Observatory), launched in 2000 with instrumentation at 65 mK [35], Some cryogenic space missions are in the preparation or in final phase in Europe, USA and Japan. For example, ESA is going to fly Planck (for the mapping of the cosmic background radiation) and Herschel (called before FIRST Far Infrared and Submillimetre Telescope ) [36], These missions will carry experiments at 0.1 and 0.3 K respectively. 

The properties of solar radiation have been established from measurements from a satellite, thus eliminating all influences from the earth s atmosphere. From the measured Planck s spectrum and by fitting Equation 17.3, it can be concluded that the sun is a black body [5], that its emissivity e = 1, and that its temperature is Ts = 5762 K. The sun emits a photon energy flux s, arid... 

We expect that all of these mysteries will be cleared up — and new ones generated — by the release of further data from WMAP expected in 2004 and beyond, many ongoing ground- and balloon-based observing campaigns, and eventually the Planck Surveyor satellite, due to be launched in 2007. 

An important prediction of the inflationary scenario for the origin of CMBR anisotropy is a sequence of maxima in the multipole spectrum (Hu 2001). The latest results (see Fig. 12.1) confirm the existence of at least two further maxima, in addition to the main maximum known before. The new satellite-based CMBR observations by the European satellite PLANCK launched in May 2009 will improve the accuracy of the deduced cosmological parameters to 0.5% and determine the multipole projection of the anisotropy up to angular momentum I 2,500. 

The best surface roughness ever made has been achieved for the ROSAT (Rontgen satellite) mirrors with about two A RMS (root mean square) microroughness. This value has been measured by X-ray scatter measurement at the PANTER test facility of the MPE (Max Planck Institut fiir Extrater-restrische Physik). The contour accuracy of the mirror shells with parabolic shape in the primaries and hyperbolic shape in the secondaries reached an X-ray performance of three arcsec HEW (half energy width) for the complete mirror system of Wolter type I with four concentric nested mirrors [4.39]. 

One must distinguish two phases which is the specificity of this task. A first phase, lasting a very short time, just a few minutes, which starts from the ignition of the launcher up to the orbital injection of the payload (telecom. Earth, and deep space observation satellites, spatial telescope like recently Herschel and Planck, the automated transport vehicle [ATV] from Astrium Space Transportation baptized symbolically Jules Verne). This is followed by a second phase, of a very long duration, 15 years of orbital fife for telecom satellites. 

Future measurements of the polarization of the CMBR with the Microwave Anisotropy Probe (MAP) and the Planck Surveyor satellites will be able to distinguish between scalar perturbations, which are caused by density perturbations, and tensor perturbations, which are caused by gravitational waves, and thus provide a method of directly observing cosmological gravitational waves. 

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