IPAC Planck Home Page

Welcome to the home page of the Planck team at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center (IPAC). The links on the menu below will move you around our website and bring you back here (Home).

Visualize and download Planck data using the IRSA archive

Planck is a European Space Agency mission with significant NASA involvement to measure the intensity and polarization of the sky over a range of frequencies from 30 to 857 GHz (wavelengths 1 cm to 350 microns). The telescope and instruments were designed to improve upon measurements of the intensity and polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB). The lowest frequencies overlap with the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, and the highest frequencies extend far into the submillimeter in order to improve upon separation between galactic foregrounds and the CMB.

More information on the Planck mission is available from the US Public Planck website and the ESA Planck website.

Here at IPAC we have two primary tasks:

Generate the Early Release Compact Source Catalog (ERCSC), which was the first public data product from the mission.
Serve as the US data center, with IPAC engineers and scientists responsible for retrieving mission data from the Planck Data Processing Centers (in Paris, France and Trieste, Italy) and staging data for usage by Planck team members and scientists interested in doing archival research with the public Planck data.