Planck Early Results: The Planck mission

TL;DR

The paper reports on the initial operational performance and scientific data collection of the ESA's Planck satellite, highlighting its successful survey of the sky and initial astrophysical findings from its early data release.

Contribution

It provides an overview of Planck's first year of operations, detailing its performance and initial scientific results from the Early Release Compact Source Catalogue.

Findings

Successful sky survey with high data quality

Initial astrophysical source catalog released

Insights into diffuse emission and cosmic sources

Abstract

The European Space Agency's Planck satellite was launched on 14 May 2009, and has been surveying the sky stably and continuously since 13 August 2009. Its performance is well in line with expectations, and it will continue to gather scientific data until the end of its cryogenic lifetime. We give an overview of the history of Planck in its first year of operations, and describe some of the key performance aspects of the satellite. This paper is part of a package submitted in conjunction with Planck's Early Release Compact Source Catalogue, the first data product based on Planck to be released publicly. The package describes the scientific performance of the Planck payload, and presents results on a variety of astrophysical topics related to the sources included in the Catalogue, as well as selected topics on diffuse emission.