The Planck Mission and its Products
Abstract
Planck (http://www.esa.int/Planck) is an astronomical satellite part of the Scientific Programme of the European Space Agency, which was designed to image the anisotropies of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) over the whole sky, with unprecedented sensitivity and angular resolution. Planck is a major source of information relevant to many cosmological and astrophysical issues. The ability to measure to high accuracy the angular power spectrum of the CMB fluctuations allows the determination of fundamental cosmological parameters with an uncertainty better than a percent. In addition to the main cosmological goals of the mission, the Planck sky survey can be used to study in detail the very sources of emission which "contaminate" the signal due to the CMB, and will result in a wealth of information on the properties of extragalactic sources, and on the dust and gas in our own galaxy.Planck was launched together with Herschel on 14 May 2009. Its payload surveyed the sky continuously between July 2009 and October 2013. In January 2011 the first Planck data product (the Early Release Compact Source Catalogue) and scientific results were released to the public. The second data release took place on March 2013, and included maps of the whole sky at nine frequencies as well as maps of the major physical emission components. The third data release is taking place between February and May 2015, and includes all the data acquired by Planck.I will present - on behalf of the Planck Collaboration - a very brief overview of the Planck mission, its scientific objectives, and also briefly describe its most recent scientific results. Next, I will concentrate on describing the Planck data products that have been publicly released, and how they can serve a wide community of users. This talk is intended to be an appropriate introduction to the IAU GA Focus Meeting “The Legacy of Planck”.
- Publication:
-
IAU General Assembly
- Pub Date:
- August 2015
- Bibcode:
- 2015IAUGA..2221273T