Planck Warms Up

Nearly two-and-a-half years after its launch, the end of ESA’s Planck mission has begun. (In fact, the BBC scooped the rest of the Planck collaboration itself with a story last week; you can read the UK take at the excellent Cardiff-led public Planck site.)

Planck’s High-Frequency Instrument (HFI) instrument must be cooled to 0.1 degrees above absolute zero, maintained at this temperature by a series of refrigerators — which had been making Planck the coldest known object in space, colder than the 2.7 degrees to which the cosmic microwave background itself warms even the most regions of intergalactic space. The final cooler in the chain relies on a tank of the Helium-3 isotope, which has finally run out, within days of its predicted lifetime — and giving Planck more than twice as much time observing the Universe as its nominal 14-month mission.

The Low-Frequency Instrument (LFI) doesn’t require such cold temperatures, although in fact they do use one of the earlier stages in the chain, the UK-built 4-degree cooler, as a reference against which it compares its measurements. LFI will, therefore, continue its measurements for the next half-year or so.

But our work, of course, goes on: we will continue to process and analyse Planck’s data, refining our maps of the sky, and get down to the real work of extracting a full sky’s worth of astrophysics and cosmology from our data. The first, preliminary, release of Planck data happened just one year ago, and yet more new Planck science will be presented at a conference in Bologna in a few months. The most exciting and important work will be getting cosmology from Planck data, which we expect to first present in early 2013, and likely in further iterations beyond that.