🛰️ Mission
Planck
Took the sharpest picture of the oldest light there is.
- Launched
- 14 May 2009, 17 years ago
- Worked for
- 4 years, until 23 October 2013
- Built by
- ESA
- Sees
- Microwaves
- Where it is
- Worked a million and a half kilometres from Earth, then was parked in an orbit around the Sun
- Best known for
- Mapped the oldest light in fine enough detail to date the universe at 13.8 billion years and weigh what it is made of
Did you know?
- It shared its rocket with Herschel: one Ariane 5 carried both telescopes up in May 2009 and let them go minutes apart.
- Its detectors were cooled to a tenth of a degree above absolute zero — for a while, the coldest known place in space.
What it showed us
The Milky Way
Our home galaxy. The Sun is one of its hundreds of billions of stars.
Andromeda Galaxy
The nearest big galaxy, and one day it will merge with ours.
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.