Mathematics – Logic
Scientific paper
Mar 1999
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=1999xmm..pres....4.&link_type=abstract
XMM Press Release INFO 4-1999
Mathematics
Logic
Scientific paper
Planck and FIRST will be launched together in the year 2007. Planck is a cosmology mission, designed to test the models describing the origin and evolution of the early Universe. It will do so by studying the Cosmic Background Radiation, a light emitted shortly after the Big Bang that fills the whole Universe and can be detected today, like an "echo" of that primeval explosion. Astronomers consider it a "fossil" radiation, since it holds a lot of information about both the past and the future of the Universe.
"Planck will determine fundamental characteristics of the Universe, such as its geometry, its density, and the rate at which it expands. It will also provide important clues as to the kind of matter that fills the Universe", explains Planck Project Scientist Jan Tauber, at ESA's European Space Research and Technology Centre (ESTEC) in The Netherlands. More precisely, the task of Planck will be to measure the temperature of the "echo" of the Big Bang over the whole sky. Though at the time of its emission the Cosmic Background Radiation was very hot, some 3000 degrees, it has since expanded and cooled together with the entire cosmos to a much lower temperature, namely about minus 270 degrees centigrade (3 degrees Kelvin).
Planck will look for differences in this temperature as slight as a few microkelvin, thin variations like clots that are, in fact, the "seeds" of the huge condensations of matter in today's Universe. "It will be like watching the birth of the galaxies, the galaxy clusters, all the large-scale structures that we observe today", Tauber says.
The two instruments on board Planck, now approved by ESA, are the Low Frequency Instrument (LFI) and the High Frequency Instrument (HFI).They will cover a very broad range of frequencies (between 30 and 857 Gigahertz).
The HFI will be designed and built by a Consortium of about 20 institutes led by Jean-Loup Puget of the Institut d'Astrophysique Spatiale in Orsay (France). The LFI will be designed and built by a Consortium of about 20 institutes led by Reno Mandolesi of the Istituto di Tecnologie e Studio delle Radiazioni Extraterrestri in Bologna (Italy).
FIRST, the "Far InfraRed and Submillimetre Telescope", is the successor of ESA's Infrared Space Observatory ISO. It will be more powerful than any of its predecessors, with a primary mirror of 3.5 metres in diameter - the largest ever for an infrared space telescope. It will observe at wavelength's range never covered before (from 80 to 670 microns). Like Planck, it will be located about 1.5 million kilometres away from Earth. FIRST will look for planetary systems and study processes like the evolution of galaxies in the early universe. It will provide very detailed information about the coldest objects in the Universe, and those enshrouded by dust. The pre-stellar cores from which the stars hatch at nearly minus 260 degrees C, or the dusty distant galaxies undergoing violent collisions are some examples. Also, FIRST will show the composition, temperature, density and motion of the gas and dust of the clouds in the interstellar space.
Its payload will consist of three instruments: two cameras called PACS and SPIRE, and HIFI, a high-resolution spectrometer. "They are real technological challenges. Instruments like these have never been used in a space telescope", says FIRST Project Scientist Goeran Pilbratt, at ESA/ESTEC.
To avoid the "noise" caused by the emission of the instruments themselves, a cryostat full of superfluid liquid helium will cool them down to a temperature below minus 271 degrees C, very close to the absolute zero (at -273 degrees C).
The Heterodyne Instrument for FIRST (HIFI) takes very high resolution spectra of the astronomical objects in thousands of frequencies simultaneously. It will be designed and built by a consortium led by Thijs de Graauw, SRON, Groningen, in The Netherlands.
The Photoconductor Array Camera and Spectrometer (PACS) instrument is an infrared camera and a spectrometer that will be developed and built by a consortium led by Albrecht Poglitsch, MPE, Garching, in Germany.
The Spectral and Photometric Imaging REceiver (SPIRE) is also a camera and spectrometer, but will observe at longer wavelengths than PACS. It will be developed and built by a consortium led by Matt J. Griffin, Queen Mary and Westfield College, London, UK.
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