COBE (astronomy)
COBE or Cosmic Background Explorer satellite, was launched on November 18, 1989. COBE was designed and developed to investigate the origins of the universe and succeeded in producing images of the universe as it would have been in its infancy some 13.7 billion years ago. [1] The accomplishments of the COBE were so significant that COBE’s originators, John C. Mather (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center) and George F. Smoot (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California at Berkeley) were awarded the 2006 Nobel Prize for physics.[2]
Instrumentation
COBE was developed by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center to measure the diffuse infrared and microwave radiation from the early universe, COBE carried three instruments,
- Diffuse Infrared Background Experiment (DIRBE) to search for the cosmic infrared background radiation;[3]
- Differential Microwave Radiometer (DMR) to map the cosmic radiation;[4]
- Far Infrared Absolute Spectrophotometer (FIRAS) to compare the spectrum of the cosmic microwave background radiation with blackbody radiation.[5]
References
- ↑ Universe Evolution Image from Smoot Group representing the range of time for the COBE background radiation map
- ↑ George Smoot Wins Nobel Prize in Physics
- ↑ DIRBE
- ↑ DMR
- ↑ FIRAS
External Links
COBE National Aeronautics and Space Administration COBE Smoot Group Astrophysics and Cosmology