The Planck Mission

Planck is the third Medium-Sized Mission (M3) of ESA's Horizon 2000 Scientific Program. The basic scientific goal of the Planck mission is to measure CMB anisotropies at all angular scales larger than 10 arcminutes over the entire sky with a precision of ~2 parts per million. The model payload consists of a 1.5 meter off-axis telescope with two focal plane arrays of detectors sharing the focal plane. Low frequencies will be covered by 56 tuned radio receivers sensitive to 30-100 GHz, while high frequencies will be covered by 56 bolometers sensitive to 100-850 GHz. The spacecraft will take 6 months to reach the L2 Lagrange point, from where it will map the full sky in another 6 months.

The Science Team site includes recent project news, a picture gallery, public documents, a technical overview, a scientific overview, schedules, and a link to the instrument consortia (High Frequency Instrument, Low Frequency Instrument and Telescope).