The Planck Mission
Most of us think of the Planck Mission as either an extension of the WMAP, or as the answer to (and correction of) the WMAP. It’s not used to unseat WMAP, but to serve as the next step.
The Planck satellite - NASA image
Launched in May of 2009, Planck resides in the Earth’s second Lagrange point (yes, you do TOO know what a Lagrange point is). That’s about 930,000 miles out. More sensitive than WMAP, Planck images the oldest radiation in the universe; the cosmic microwave background. This radiation was created 13 billion years ago (plus or minus) in the Big Bang, and has existed every since – traveling away from its point of origin in all directions.
NASA image - The CMB as imaged by Planck
To really understand what Planck is viewing, you have to spend some time reading up on the cosmic microwave background — but I’ll give you a quick review. When the universe was very young, it was uniformly filled with a “fog” of glowing hydrogen plasma and radiation. As the universe aged and expanded, this “fog” became thinner and cooler, and eventually formed matter. The radiation remained equally distributed as the universe expanded, and exactly the same amount of photons filled a larger and larger universe. That’s “relic radiation”, and that’s the cosmic microwave background.
Didn’t catch it? Okay; picture hair mousse. Spray some in your hand and it will begin to expand. Same mass of hair mousse, larger blob filling your hand.
Now, what Planck is doing is sending information on this radiation (which it “images”) to supercomputers around the world. In the United States, that’s the Franklin computer in Berkeley (primarily). The information is analyzed by ESA, NASA, and JPL, among others.
NASA image - Another view of the CMB from Planck
As our understanding of the early universe increases through the data from Planck, we will know more about the size, shape, mass, age, and fate of our universe. Will it expand forever, or someday collapse back upon itself? Planck may give us the answer. Don’t forget, also, that Planck may very well help us solve the dark matter/dark energy mystery.
We will never reach a place where we know everything about the universe. Not only is it much too vast and complicated, it appears possible that there are infinite universes with infinite mystery. Doesn’t that just give you goose bumps?
3 thoughts on “The Planck Mission”
If the microwave radiation is left over from the big bang and is traveling outward at the speed of light, and nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, how can we be out here to see it continually streaming past us? This is the paradox that science has not truly yet answered.
It’s just one of the many “paradoxes” on which we are working. That’s one thing that makes the sciences so exciting; we never know it all. There are always more things to learn. My mind is still short-circuited over the cat problem. That’s the intersection of physics and philosophy, and it completely blows my mind.
Nothing paradoxical about it. The universe can expand faster than the speed of light because the fabric of the universe is not the content of the universe. Light has been traveling for 13.7 billion years of time, yet we can see across a 45.7 billion light years of distance, back to the beginning (or close to it- the CMB). Universe expansion makes lots of weird sounding stuff very possible and logical.
Check out the WMAP web site for some help.
map.gsfc.nasa.gov/resources/edactivity1.html
Planck will expand on what WMAP has learned. In fact they will probably use WMAP measurements to test Planck’s calibration. Planck and WMAP overlap detection ranges, not duplicate.