The European Space Agency (ESA) has just launched two high-tech space observatories; the Herschel and Planck telescopes will investigate the origin of the Universe, looking far out into space and back in time to the Big Bang.
They were launched from Kourou, French Guiana on an Ariane 5 ECA heavy lift rocket.
Jean-Jacques Dordain, the agency's director general, explained in a statement, "ESA is en route to the origin of the Universe. Let's imagine that we shall see the first light after the 'Big Bang'." The pair then sent an all-is-well radio signal back to Kourou. ESA gave a Twitter update that the spacecraft separated from the rocket and that the satellites signaled, "both satellites are alive!"
The Herschel and Planck space observatories will now travel for four to six months until they reach their orbits at the second Lagrangian point (L2), 1.5 million kilometres (937,000 miles) from Earth and away from the Sun.
Herschel is the largest and most powerful infrared telescope ever launched and is designed to investigate how stars and galaxies form from clouds of gas and dust. The main telescope mirror, four times bigger than any previously launched infrared mirror, is 3.5m (11.4 ft) in diameter. It uses 2300 liters of liquid helium as a coolant and the spacecraft weighs 3.4 tons with a 3.5 year lifetime, and is 7.5m tall by 4m wide.
The collected light is sent to three spectrometers and cameras cooled by liquid helium to almost absolute zero (-273.15°C (-459F) designed to minimize noise in the observations and achieve superb imaging resolution.
Planck is more modest with a 1.5x1.9m (4.8ft) primary mirror, being only 4.2m tall and wide, with two ultra-sensitive Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation detectors that can measure temperature differences down to a millionth of a kelvin.
Planck measures the background radiation left over from the Big Bang, when the universe was created 14 billion years ago. The spacecraft weighs around 1.9 tons, has a special sun and moon shield, with specialized on board refrigerators, including state-of-the-art cryogenic coolers, to cool the detectors to -272.9°C, just one tenth of a degree above absolute zero.
It is hoped Planck will record the "the sharpest picture ever" of the Universe, when it was only 380,000 years old, helping to explain why the Universe is expanding and accelerating, confirm some physics’ constants (the Hubble value). It may also detect the elusive "dark matter" that makes up 23% of the Universe but has never been measured before.
Resources
Herschel: http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Herschel/index.html
Planck: http://www.esa.int/esaSC/120398_index_0_m.html
Trevor Williams is a University of Victoria Mechanical Engineering PhD candidate specialising in renewable energy, power grid modelling and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles. He has a bachelors in Aeronautical Engineering, a Masters in Management Science and over 23 years international experience in the space industry, having worked on Earth observation and telecommunications satellites. He is the author of the Eco-Geek blog.
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