Planck: Mission Status SummaryWebsite links - Sky coverage - Orbit - Milestones Last update: February 5, 2010. On 15th January 2010, ESA's advisory bodies approved an extension of Planck operations by 12 months. Planck is now scheduled to continuously acquire high-quality science data until the end of 2011. Planck has been performing its planned mission since mid-August 2009 and, at this point, all systems are functioning very well. A set of Technical Reports concerning the Planck Low Frequency Instrument on-board ESA's Planck satellite were published by JINST on December 29 2009. These papers are open access and free for everyone to read. Website links The ESA, HFI, LFI, JPL/Caltech, MPA, and UK Planck websites provide a lot of information on the mission. Entries of commentary on Planck can be found on Andrew Jaffe's blog and blogging the Planck Mission. Planck can be followed on twitter, and on a social networking website. Sky coverage Planck describes a Lissajous trajectory around L2, with a 6 months period that avoids crossing the Earth penumbra for at least 5 years, and it observes the sky by scanning nearly great circles on the celestial sphere, and periodically shifting the spin axis to remain anti-Sun throughout the year. The Figure bellow illustrates the status of the sky coverage. This full sky Mollweide projection shows, in the galactic coordinate system, the sky coverage gradient on February 4 2010. Red areas have been observed by all Planck detectors. Black areas have not been observed by any detector yet. Colors in between represent the proportion of detector onboard Planck which have observed the area (units are arbitrary). The figure is by X. Dupac, ESAC. Some Planck pointing data are already available for external observers.  Trajectory and orbit Planck was launched on May 14 2009, and has arrived at L2 on July 3 2009. The ephemerides for the Planck spacecraft are available via the HORIZONS system. The diagrams below show Planck's trajectory to L2, and its current and planned orbit. Each tick mark corresponds to two weeks. The coordinate system is an osculating, co-rotating Earth/Moon barycentre-Sun system: X axis along the Sun - Earth/Moon barycentre direction; Z axis along the angular momentum vector of the Earth/Moon barycentre movement around the Sun; Y axis completes the right hand system. The origin of the system is the Earth/Moon barycentre, thus, you find the Sun in -x direction. The figures are by R. Cramm, ESOC. 2009 trajectory and orbit  2010 orbit  Major achieved milestones | Date | Event |
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| May 14 2009 | Planck is launched, on an Ariane 5 rocket from ESA's Spaceport in French Guiana, into its planned trajectory towards L2. | | July 3 2009 | Planck arrives at L2 and its payload and all the spacecraft subsystems work at nominal temperatures. | | August 13 2009 | Planck starts its First All Sky Survey after successfully concluding its commissioning phase. | | September 17 2009 | Planck yields promising results. Please, visit the first Planck post launch press release and more in depth. | | 2nd half of September 2009 | Planck observes the Crab Nebula, one of the brightest sky objects at the Planck frequencies, and an important source for checking its polarization calibration. | | 2nd half of October 2009 | Planck observes Mars and Jupiter. The observation of planets provide important data needed to characterize Planck's beams. | | 1st half of November 2009 | Planck observes Neptune. | | 1st half of December 2009 | Planck observes Uranus. | | December 2009 | Pre-release of Planck's internal archive for scientific exploitation within the Planck collaboration. | | 1st half of January 2010 | Planck observes Saturn. |
Major upcoming milestones | Date | Event |
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| February 2010 | First science release of Planck's internal archive for scientific exploitation within the Planck collaboration. | | 1st half of March 2010 | Planck observes the Crab Nebula. | | 1st half of April 2010 | Planck observes Mars. | | April 2010 | Planck starts its Second All Sky Survey. | | 1st half of May 2010 | Planck observes Neptune. | | 1st half of June 2010 | Planck observes Saturn. | | 2nd half of June 2010 | Planck observes Uranus and Jupiter. | | June 2010 | Second science release of Planck's internal archive for scientific exploitation within the Planck collaboration. | | December 2010 | An early all-sky catalogue of compact and point sources extracted from Planck's data is released to the scientific community. | | 2012 | Calibrated time-ordered data, full sky maps at each frequency, full sky component maps (CMB, and Galactic emission), and a final compact source catalog are made publicly available. |
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