WMAP Probe Completes Primary Science Mission

Officials at NASA announce that their Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), which has been conducting surveys of the cosmic microwave background for over nine years, has finally ended its primary science mission.

The spacecraft conducts observations of the CMB, which is the oldest light in the Universe. This radiation is one of the main evidence astrophysicists have that the Big Bang actually happened.

Some 13.7 billion years ago, a singularity resulted in a rapid inflation, that scientists now call the Big Bang. Following this event, the known Universe began developing.

As this happened, a large amount of light particles called photons were produced, and they spread out evenly throughout the entire Cosmos, forming a sort of background.

This CMB is now being extensively analyzed by physicists, using telescopes and space probes, and WMAP is the flagship mission of the international scientific community.

“WMAP has opened a window into the earliest Universe that we could scarcely imagine a generation ago,”explains expert and mission manager Gary Hinshaw.

“The team is still busy analyzing the complete nine-year set of data, which the scientific community eagerly awaits,” adds the scientist in an official NASA press release.

He holds an appointment as an astrophysicist at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) in Greenbelt, Maryland. The scientific model that now describes the history and structure of the Universe is owed to the WMAP, he adds.

“We launched this mission in 2001, accomplished far more than our initial science objectives, and now the time has come for a responsible conclusion to the satellite's operations,” adds Charles Bennett.

He is the principal investigator of the WMAP mission. The expert is based at the Johns Hopkins University (JHU), in Baltimore.

Bennett says that the WMAP is also responsible for analyzing the age of the Universe (13.75 billion years old) with the highest degree of precision. It holds a Guinness world record to prove it, too.

“WMAP gave definitive measurements of the fundamental parameters of the Universe. Scientists will use this information for years to come in their quest to better understand the Universe,” says Jaya Bapayee, the WMAP program executive at NASA Headquarters, in Washington DC.