ESA has finally decided on a lift-off date

Apr 29, 2009 10:04 GMT  ·  By

After a number of delays, prompted by technical concerns over the European Space Agency's (ESA) Herschel and Planck twin telescopes, mission controllers at the agency's Kourou spaceport, in the French Guyana, South America, finally gave the mission the green light. The two observatories will be launched on May 14th, aboard an Ariane 5 delivery system, and will be delivered in the L2 Lagrangian point, at a distance of 1.5 million kilometers away from Earth, as opposed to the Sun.

This is one of five such points, which allow a telescope to remain in the same position relative to the Sun, the Earth and the Moon, an orbit in which the light coming from the three celestial bodies cannot interfere with scientific observations of the Universe. The yet-to-be-constructed James Webb Space Telescope will be deployed in a similar position around 2015, for an optimum observation range.

“I'm extremely proud of the fact that the European Space Agency is launching two big observatories during the International Year of Astronomy. Herschel and Planck are part of the new generation of astronomical observatories. We started off close to the Earth and we've gradually moved further away; but in the future, most observatories will be in deep space, beyond the orbit of the Moon. This allows you to control better the conditions under which the telescopes operate,” Professor David Southwood, who is ESA's science director, told the BBC News.

Herschel will survey its targets in the far-infrared and sub-millimeter wavelengths. The 7.5-meter-high observatory is in charge with determining exactly how galaxies form, and how they evolve to become the supermassive formations some of them get to be. The smaller Planck has an equally difficult mission, in that its objective is to survey the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). This type of radiation can only be detected with radio observers, but it can yield significant knowledge on how the Universe itself came to be, as well as on why it looks like it currently does.

“We will be extremely nervous until we have the rocket off the planet. You take all this very sensitive, hi-tech work – very complex – and you put it on top of a big, big firework. That's nerve-wracking. It's, I'm afraid, what space is all about, and we cannot make the measurements we want to make with Herschel and Planck, unless we went off the planet. These are things we have to do to explore the Universe,” Professor Southwood concluded.