Planck Space Telescope

An artist's rendering of the Planck space telescope. Image courtesy: NASA/ESA.

The Planck space telescope has started to collect data on its 15 month data gathering mission. It’s main objective is to observe the fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) to much better accuracy than is known before so we get a glimpse of the universe at its birth, i.e., the big bang.

One of the features of the telescope, which I find to be the coolest, is:

Planck’s instrument detectors are so sensitive that temperature variations of a few millionths of a degree will be distinguishable.

Now that is just plain awesome! Other objectives of the telescope can be found at the following link from ESA.

Enjoy!

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