Wicked Cool

The coldest object in space.. is a European spacecraft.

The Planck spacecraft is designed to study the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). This was the first radiation/light put out after the big bang (only 380,000 years after or so), and thus is very important in understanding the origin and nature of the universe (little questions like that).

The most interesting part of the spacecraft itself is that it sensors work best at minus 459.49 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 273.05 Celsius, for those Europeans/scientists among us). And if you were thinking that looked a lot like absolute zero, you were right: it is just 0.1 degrees Celsius above that deep freeze.

Impressively, passive cooling actually gets the craft down to -230C, just by radiating heat out into the near vacuum of space. After that point, three active coolers bring it down below the magic number of -270C, which is when it is first possible to detect CMB.

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