Planck Surveyor

The Planck Surveyor is the third Medium-Sized Mission (M3) of ESA's Horizon 2000 Scientific Programme. It is designed to image the anisotropies of the Cosmic microwave background Radiation over the whole sky, with unprecedented sensitivity and angular resolution. Planck will provide a major source of information relevant to several cosmological and astrophysical issues, such as testing theories of the early universe and the origin of cosmic structure. Planck was formerly called COBRAS/SAMBA. After the mission was selected and approved, it was renamed in honor of the German scientist Max Planck (1858-1947), Nobel Prize for Physics in 1918. The mission will be a colaboration with NASA, and will complement the WMAP probe which measured larger-scale fluctuations.

External Links

PLANCK Surveyor (ex-COBRAS/SAMBA) on the internet