Pingie: HTTP:: Planck Telescope Sees First Light

HTTP:: Planck Telescope Sees First Light
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The recently launched Planck telescope finally began to observe the Universe on August 13th, during a test-observation period. Built specifically by the European Space Agency (ESA) to analyze the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), the relic radiation left behind when the Cosmos first exploded into being, the telescope is now the coldest object in the known Universe. It circles the Sun in a Lagrangian orbit, in the L2 point, alongside ESA's other large observatory, the Herschel Space Telescope, AlphaGalileo reports. The two-week first light survey began on August 13th, after the calibration of all subsystems on the satellite, and the cool-down of its instruments' detectors was achieved. The telescope's mission is to survey the sky and detect variations in the CMB temperature that are equivalent to measuring the body heat of a rabbit located on the Moon. It was therefore cooled to temperatures close to absolute zero (â€"273.15°Celsius, or zero Kelvin). The goal of the te!
sts was to determine whether Planck's instruments were stable enough to allow for the precise observations that were planned for it. Additionally, mission controllers needed to determine whether its detectors could be precisely tuned enough to allow for the subtle variations in the CMB temperature, which are about a million times smaller than...
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http://news.softpedia.com/news/Planck-Telescope-Sees-First-Light-121965.shtml
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