Planck Space Telescope

The Planck Space Telescope will be "retired" this week, following its successful four-year mission to prove the universe is more than 80 million years older than what was ever known.

According to RIA Novosti on 23 October, Steve Foley, Planck's mission leader, said the Planck telescope would be shut down by the European Space Agency (ESA) on October 23, at 19:00 (according to VN time).

Foley said the Planck glass has been cleaned of the fuel tank and taken to a safe orbit around the sun, away from Earth and the moon, where it will last for hundreds of years quietly.

"The last step will be a simple action to turn off the transmitter (signal). We will witness Planck's silence and we will never receive the" her "signal again , " the company said. AFP news quoted Foley in a statement.

Planck Space Telescope has completed the mission of mapping cosmic background radiation - (Photo: ESA)

This is important because it will not interfere with radio waves for future missions, Foley added.

According to AFP, Planck's order of termination of operations is similar to the way " Herschel " retired earlier this year.

Launched on May 14, 2009 by the Ariane 5 rocket from the Kourou Space Center in French Guiana, Herschel is responsible for studying the origins of stars and galaxies, while Planck carries out the search mission. Background radiation from the "Big Bang" event created the universe about 14 billion years ago.

Named after the 20th century German physicist Max Planck, the father of quantum theory, the Planck space telescope is equipped with a giant glass to measure the temperature emitted by cosmic background radiation (CMB). , that is, radiation rays left over from the early universe, about 380,000 years after the Big Bang.

In March, ESA unveiled a 50 million-pixel quality panoramic sky shot of the remnants of the Big Bang's cosmic remnants, summarizing data sent from the Planck telescope.

"This is a giant jump in our knowledge of the origin of the universe," ESA Director General Jean-Jacques Dordain said of the oldest map of light in the universe published on.

Published data show that the universe expanded at a slower rate than what was known, and led to adjusting the age of the universe to 13.82 billion years.