🛰️ Mission
COBE
Photographed the afterglow of the Big Bang, and won a Nobel Prize.
- Launched
- 18 November 1989, 36 years ago
- Worked for
- 4 years, until 23 December 1993
- Built by
- NASA
- Sees
- Microwaves, Infrared light
- Where it is
- Switched off in a polar orbit about 900 km up, where it still circles
- Best known for
- Measured the oldest light in the universe and found its first faint ripples — the seeds every galaxy grew from
Did you know?
- The glow it measured fits the shape a perfectly warm object gives off so exactly that the error bars are thinner than the line on the graph.
- Two of its scientists, John Mather and George Smoot, shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2006 for what it found.
What it showed us
The Milky Way
Our home galaxy. The Sun is one of its hundreds of billions of stars.
Explore more
All of missions
Hubble Space Telescope
Thirty-six years above the weather, and still working.
James Webb Space Telescope
A golden mirror that sees the first galaxies in infrared.
Chandra X-ray Observatory
The telescope that shows what is hot and violent.
Spitzer Space Telescope
Sixteen years of infrared, through dust that hides everything else.
Kepler
Stared at one patch of sky and found thousands of planets.
TESS
Kepler’s successor, watching the whole sky for planets.