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Successful Launch of ESA's Herschel and Planck
rgarbacz writes "Today at 13:12 GMT, the ESA launched successfully new and long-awaiting spacecraft: Herschel, the infrared telescope with a 3.5m mirror, and Planck, the CMB mapper. The spacecraft were carried by the Ariane-5, which lifted off from Kourou in French Guiana. They will stay in L2 to perform the research. This launch is one of the most expensive and important missions of the European Space Agency. Planck will measure the CMB with an accuracy more than 10 times better than the previous mission, WMAP. Because of this high sensitivity, both spacecraft are cooled to temperatures close to absolute zero by on-board liquid helium; staying in L2 is very helpful to maintain this state. Both spacecraft are designed to observe the Universe at its infancy: Herschel by observing the first stars and galaxies (whichever came first), and Planck by scrutinizing the first photons that were set free, making up the cosmic microwave background radiation."
even if it is ten times more accurate than before, I think we have a long way to go.
Planck will measure CMB with accuracy below 1%
Uhm. Is this technical terminology that I simply don't understand, or just a typo? Because I can understand a '1% margin of error', and I can sort of understand 'accurate to 1%'... but something which is below 1% accurate?
If only I could get away with that in my job.
Accuracy below 1%? Did someone put a not gate in the wrong place?
Between this and the fix ongoing on Hubble, where are set for some more time of great and impressive astronomy. Thank you NASA and ESA for keeping the good work.
Any one have any idea how they will keep the helium going on it? I tried on the articles but couldn't find the longevity and repair plans.
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Rumour spreadin a-round in that texas town,
Bout that telescope outside the second Lagrange point.
You know what I'm talkin' bout...
What is "L2"?
Plural of "spacecraft" is "spacecraft".
English, do you speak it?
It seems like the summary writer didn't understand TFA. Quoting from ESA:
The older measurements that Planck is trying to improve already are accurate to 0.1%.
It seems like someone got confused with the coincidence that the temperature of the universe, 2.7 K, is about 1% of the temperature of freezing water, 270 K.
They made a couple that were smaller, but they think they disappeared into a black hole.
First emotion: Wow! Far out: L2 is 1.5 million km from Earth beyond the orbit of the moon ( so no space shuttle service missions here... ). But before I looked it up I had completely forgotten that Mars is at best still another 53 million km and then imagining the billions of lightyears Herschel will be able to "see"... I have to buy another ticket for "Star Trek" to lose this image of an invisibly tiny blue spec in a black void in my head...
It's really awesome this thing launched succesfully. My professor of astronomy and his department worked ten years on Herschel. I'm really happy for him.
I hope the sattelite gives us a lot of useful information or at least some beautiful pictures
As long as there are slaughterhouses, there will be battlefields.
As maintainer of RTEMS, I am very proud that both spacecraft are running our free real-time operating system on at least the Spacecraft Management Unit (SMU). These are both important missions which promise to provide us with new insights.
That's probably why they spelled "arian" in place of "Ariadne" (or "Ariane" in French). To compensate i guess. Although the good spelling would have been Aryan. More seriously, great news. ;-)
UOA and WUVESDFA and very well employed in the article summary. They are great tactics to keep the reader guessing about WTF they are reading. Furthermore, overuse of hyperlinks is a big problem these days. A summary need link to nothing more than a single article, which no one will read anyway. Any other linking to clarify the meaning of the story is just wasteful. Lets hear it for more Unidentified Obscure Acronyms (UOA) and greater use of Wait Until the Very End of the Summary to Define the Fucking Acronym (WUVESDFA)!
"Ariane" the French spelling of Ariadne, a character in Greek mythology.
What's going to happen in a few years when the missions ends? Are these going to become space junk sitting in extremely valuable real estate?
The launch vehicle's name is Ariane 5. The 'e' at the end makes a bit of a difference.
I understand that they're named after some famous scientists, but how are these names any better or more notable than Colbert? It's not like I'm going to remember Sir William Herschel and Max Planck any better because they have a spacecraft named after them. I had to look both up cause I didn't know who they were.
Which L2? There are several. The convention is to express it with the initial of the Large body, then the initial of the small body: eg the Sun-Earth L2 would be SEL2; the Earth Moon would be EML2. I'm guessing this would be SEL2 so that the Earth blocks out a lot of the radiation from the Sun. Anyone know if SEL2 is within the umbra of the Earth's shadow?
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Okay, so at the point of the big bang, the entire universe was concentrated into a single point of matter.
At some point in the past the big bang occurred and matter and energy expanded from this single point at the speed of light or near it, as best we can tell. The matter and light were traveling away from the point of orgin, at the highest possible speed, the speed of light which we say is a constant and is the max attainable speed by anything, ever.
So why do scientists keep saying we're trying to see the 'first photons' when those first photons are at the front of the expanding universe, traveling faster than we are, away from us.
Obviously, I do not understand it on the same level as they do, which I think gives me the unique perspective to not be an idiot and rule out common sense, but hey, correct me, please.
So if those first photons and us are all traveling away from faster than we are moving how the fuck are we ever going to see them? They aren't going to bounce off something and come back, they are at the fore front of the expanding universe, everything for them to 'bounce off of' is behind their direction of travel.
We're not going to see the first stars or galaxies or anything else. The light and radiation passed us a long time ago as we're not traveling anywhere near the speed of light from the point of origin.
For guys that are supposed to be so smart, they either aren't, or the story about what these things are going to do has been so skewed by the time we read it that you can't get anything actually useful from the article as a geek because its been dumbed down to the point that its just wrong rather than inaccurate.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
According to this thorough article in norwegian (since norwegian scientists are involved), there is a lot of secrecy involved, so that results from Planck will not be released to the public before 2013 or 2014:
:-)
http://www.dagbladet.no/2009/05/14/nyheter/vitenskap/forskning/astronomi/verdensrommet/6203165/
(Briefly mentioned also, in this blog: http://planckmission.wordpress.com/ )
Sorry, no proper translation from norwegian to english available:
http://tinyurl.com/orlkmu
In short, it says that because of competition between the scientists, there will be strict regulations and that scientist who forget to log out of their PC ("turn their monitor off") or bring any data off the premises, will be excluded from further studies and further monitoring of the Planck observatory.
Which I find strange, since there is only one Planck observatory like there is only one Hubble telescope, and there were no secrecy around the images released from it.
If one scientist give up his or her data, so that other scientists can get advantages which might make them "win the competition", why exclude scientists who "volunteer" information?
This, I don't understand, do they expect to find proof of alien presence?
And both spacecrafts' Mission Control Systems at ESOC (European Space Operations Centre) are running Linux as well. Yeah free software!
If the earth is 8000 miles in diameter, the L2 point 930,000 miles from earth, the sun is 870,000 miles in diameter, and 93,000,000 miles from earth, then the sun will subtend about .53 degree in the sky from the L2 point, and the earth will subtend about .49 degree. So -- the sun will be eclipsed by the earth, but it will be an annular eclipse -- even if the Hershel and Planck were right in the middle of the shadow, they would see a rim of sun all around the earth.
Is my math wrong? Or are these telescopes still going to be in light, even if it's only 4% as bright as the full sun.
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
It is kind of harder to grasp than that. You are talking as if the big bang was an explosion in a universe like ours, resulting in all sorts of stuff expanding away from a point. Actually at the time of the big bang, all of space was concentrated into that one point, there was ( and is) nothing outside, not even empty space. So the universe is expanding, but it is not expanding into previously empty space, the space in the universe itself is getting bigger.
So any light within the early universe would be travelling within space and would always do so. Not necessarily in a straight line of course, it is affected by gravity too.
Damn. I read the headline and my first thought was that ESA was a game company and "Herschel and Planck" was a cleverly named video game!
The first photons that were created are still bouncing about in the form of cosmic background radiation. That is what the cosmic background radiation is
Also just to confuse things, in the initial phases of the big bang, the universe was expanding much faster than the speed of light.
As far as the current expansion most of the universe >90% is already outside our light cone so it's gone as far as we're concerned. Unless we come up with FTL travel, and that's not happening for all kinds of fun reasons.
I am not an expert.
At first I thought this was a new spinoff game release. However I'd expect the title to come from SCEA, not ESA.
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Well they are not mindless automatons. And they need stable OS which they can adapt to their needs. And their should be no usage restriction. So they only can use free OS.
Okay, so at the point of the big bang, the entire universe was concentrated into a single point of matter.
At some point in the past the big bang occurred and matter and energy expanded from this single point at the speed of light or near it, as best we can tell. The matter and light were traveling away from the point of orgin, at the highest possible speed, the speed of light which we say is a constant and is the max attainable speed by anything, ever.
No you are wrong. Not the matter and energy traveled away from a point in space. The space expanded. I know the phrase "Big Bang" implies an explosion, but it was no explosion it was an expansion. An expansion of space. Therefore nothing traveled. And space can theoretically expand faster than the speed of light.
Read a basic book on astrophysics. A new one. After the big bang, the universe expanded faster than light. Unfortunately, your unique perspective is what most of us call stupidity.