The Planck Newsletter Issue 6 Information and news for the Planck community June 2004 Planck, the Virtual Busy times ahead Observatory and the Grid J. Tauber R.G. Mann, A.J. Banday and K.M. Gorski The year started very auspiciously with a well-attended and stimulating 2nd Planck Symposium which highlighted the Planck’s newest Working Group - WG8: Virtual Observa- undiminished expectations for Planck. tory - has been set up to coordinate the interface between the Planck consortia and the rapidly developing Virtual Obser- However, the most exciting aspect of the current year is the vatory and Grid computing communities. A number of areas production of the first sets of flight-like hardware. Both at of Planck activity might benefit significantly from advances spacecraft and at instrument level, qualification models have coming from those domains, but to do so will require active been built of almost all subsystems (see the reports else- engagement with them. It is the task of WG8 to lead that en- where in this issue). The sorption cooler pipework and cold gagement, but its success depends on input from across the end qualification model are the first instrument hardware full Planck community. delivered to ESA, and JPL is rightfully proud of that fact. It feels very good to start seeing and touching the fruits of so The VO and the Grid many years of work by so many people! The Virtual Observatory (VO) concept centres on the federa- tion of the world’s significant astronomical data sources, and The preparations for the instrument-level qualification cam- is likely to provide the environment within which much as- paigns are now in full swing, and the LFI and HFI teams are tronomical research is undertaken by the time that Planck expecting a very busy summer with this activity. By the flies. It would be useful, therefore, that some parts of Planck autumn both instrument qualification models (QMs) should infrastructure are made “VO-compliant” so that scientists – have been tested and calibrated. The HFI QM will then be including Planck consortium members within the proprietary delivered to ESA for integration into a satellite QM, which period – can access Planck data using the same tools and will be cooled down to operational temperatures (~ 40 K) in standards as they employ in the rest of their research. Con- a large vacuum facility at the Centre Spatial de Liège, and versely, the Planck consortia should ensure that their specific end-to-end testing will take place. All of this will happen science requirements help inform the definition of those VO before the end of the year. standards. >>> Busy Times Ahead continues on page 3 I NSIDE T HIS I SSUE 1,3 Planck, the Virtual Observatory and the Grid 1,3 Busy times ahead 2 News from the H/P project team 3 Planck reflector development status 3 Post-doc opportunity 3,4 News from the LFI 5 Planck activity at Jodrell Bank Observatory 6 Successful component separation on real satellite data The VO’s infrastructure builds, in part, on ideas from the 7 Pronaos/Archeops Balloon experiments: a world of “Grid Computing”, a term used to cover a range of preview of dust emission for Planck and Herschel technologies being developed within both the academic 8 ProC: a workflow engine for Planck computer science and commercial IT sectors to aid distribu- supercomputing ted computation: if the Web provides you with information 8 Calendar of some events nd distributed over the network, then the Grid will give you 9 The 2 Planck Symposium: Setting the scene access to computational resources located elsewhere. A 9 Call for papers number of Planck activities – notably pre-launch simula- 10 News from the HFI tions, but also, perhaps, some aspects of DPC operations – 10 About the authors 10 Call for Planck related publications >>> Planck, the VO, and the GRID continues on page 3 11 List of recent Planck related publications The Planck Newsletter is published by the PlanckThe Scie Plancknce Office,Newsletter Research 1 and Scientific Support Department of ESA, ESTEC, Noordwijk, The Netherlands. See also http://www.rssd.esa.int/Planck . from JPL driven by a hydrogen supply furnished by In- News from the H/P Project dustry. The delivery of the CQM PACE by JPL to ESA and industry in April marked the first instrument delivery for Team Planck, to be followed in September by the HFI CQM instrument. Deliveries of the two sorption cooler proto-flight Gerald Crone and Thomas Passvogel (PFM) units are anticipated for November this year and Industrial activities for both Herschel and Planck have pro- March next year. The next review cycle, the Instrument gressed sufficiently to plan to allow the start of the System Qualification review, will be initiated in the autumn and will level Critical Design Review (CDR) cycle in April. It was be in line with completion of the instrument level QM and decided to treat the CDR in two steps with a review of both sorption cooler level PFM test campaigns. Payload modules (PLMs) by the ESA project, together with The overall spacecraft deve- Alcatel preceding and leading into the second step, the full lopment is driven by availa- Space Segment CDR conducted at ESA level with the Direc- bility of the service module tor of Science and the ESA Inspector General chairing the and finalization of the service review board. The PLM CDR for Planck has already started module structure. Parallel ma- in April and will be completed in June, whilst the Herschel nufacturing is ongoing and the one will start one month later and be concluded in July. The SVM will be ready for its conclusions of each review will be fed into the ESA level re- review in August. Develop- view running from mid August until October. ment of the Planck Payload This review cycle marks the end of the industrial detailed Module is progressing well design phase and ensures that the design is complete, frozen, with the manufacture of the and compliant with the mission needs. The review will fur- QM hardware completed and ther verify that all internal and external interfaces between FM manufacturing already modules (i.e. PLM’s and Service Module - SVM), the tele- started last year. The qualifi- scope, the instruments, launcher segment, and ground seg- cation model testing of the two parts, telescope structure ment are now detailed and complete. The verification The baffle before coating. approach at system level including the testing of both the and cryostructure, is well ad- CQM and FM modules and spacecraft must be adequate and vanced. The telescope struc- commensurate with the launch date. For Planck, this marks ture has already been thermo-elastically tested using video- the go-ahead for the integration of the HFI CQM and the LFI grammetry at liquid nitrogen temperatures at Alcatel with structural thermal model with the CQM payload module, and vibration and acoustic testing nearing completion. the beginning of the cryogenic system level tests and asso- ciated instrument performance tests, to be followed by the The Planck reflectors are a joint ESA/DSRI undertaking. structural test campaign on the full spacecraft. The QM secondary mirror has completed its cryogenic pro- file measurement tests at CSL using an infrared interferome- ter. The campaign has taken longer than expected, both in The qualification model setting up the optics and the processing and interpretation of of the telescope structure assembled at the results. The limitation of the measurement technique to Alcatel resolve areas of high surface slope was already known and expected. Investigations are ongoing to determine if the detected high frequency surface errors are due to physical deformations of the reflector at cryogenic temperatures or produced by the set-up. This is currently being resolved to enable to proceed with the Primary reflector QM test and the release of flight model manufacture. Finally we must address the overall schedule of the Her- The instrument hardware design review (IHDR) cycle, schel/Planck Programme. The H/P Project Manager has re- which approves the instruments’ AVM and CQM program- cently defined a new set of delivery dates of instruments to me, the hardware for instrument level testing and the On- Industry, which are later Board software, is almost completed. The LFI follows a than those defined for the proto-flight development and not participating in the system PDR. These dates are the CQM programme. The instrument is currently in the middle baseline for the CDR exer- of its IHDR which nonetheless is reviewing the instrument’s cise and industry have plan- own internal QM programme. This review will be completed ned their assembly, integra- in June. The Sorption cooler is progressing well. Readers tion and test campaign (in- may recall that a sorption cooler simulator will be used for cluding double shift work- th the system CQM testing: the simulator comprises a full ing) to maintain the 15 Fe- bruary 2007 launch date.  flight quality pipe-work assembly and cold-end (PACE) V-grooves before coating The Planck Newsletter 2 Planck, the Virtual Observatory, and Planck Reflector the GRID – continued from page 1 Development Status would benefit from being undertaken on computational resources of a scope beyond that available at any one Planck H.U. Nørgaard Nielsen institution. The Grid may provide access to them, and Planck simulations represent an ideal application for Grid testbeds In order to verify the optical performance of the secondary to implement. reflector qualification model at cryogenic temperatures, tests have been conducted at the Centre Spatial de Liège (CSL) WG8 Initial Report and Future Plans using a 10 micron interferometer system. Starting in Sep- The membership of WG8 includes those Planck consortium tember 2003, four temperature cycles have been performed, members already active in the VO and/or Grid worlds, plus each cycle going from room temperature down to 40 K and additional individuals working on those Planck activities back.