U.S. Contributions to Planck

U.S. participation in Planck was established through an open solicitation and review of proposals by NASA's Office of Space Science in early 1997. The U.S. will provide the following functions:

Sorption Cooler - The US LFI team is responsible for the design, development, fabrication and characterization of the hydrogen sorption cooler system, excluding control electronics, that will cool the LFI to 20 K and provide pre-cooling to the HFI at 18K.

Bolometers - The US HFI team is responsible for: the design, development, fabrication, and characterization of all bolometers for the HFI; and support for the design of the feed horns, readout electronics, thermal design and sub-kelvin thermometry.

Radiometers - The US LFI team is responsible for: the design, fabrication and testing of the prototype 100 GHz radiometer; support for the design of the radiometers at other frequencies; design and testing support of the 4 K reference loads; detailed design and test requirements for TRW for the 100 GHz modules (built by TRW under a direct contract with the Italian Space Agency); support of TRW in testing and assembling the qualification and flight models of the 100 GHz modules.

Data Reduction and Analysis Support

US-Based Scientific Groups Contributing to Planck:

Caltech Observational Cosmology

Harvard Cosmology Group

Haverford Cosmology

IPAC - The Infrared Processing and Analysis Center

JPL - The Jet Propulsion Laboratory

St. Cloud State Physics/Astronomy

Santa Barbara Experiment Astrophysics and Cosmology Group

Stanford Observational Cosmology at Millimeter Wavelengths Group

UC Berkeley CMB

UC Davis Cosmology