Launch and Orbit
The satellite was successfully launched, along with the Herschel Space Observatory, at 13:12:02 UTC on 14 May 2009 aboard an Ariane 5 ECA heavy launch vehicle. The launch placed the craft into a very elliptical orbit (perigee: 270 km, apogee: more than 1,120,000 km), bringing it near the L2 Lagrangian point of the Earth-Sun system, 1.5 million kilometers from the Earth.
The maneuver to inject Planck into its final orbit around L2 was successfully completed on July 3, 2009, when it entered a Lissajous orbit of 400,000 km radius around the L2 Lagrangian point. The temperature of the High Frequency Instrument reached just a tenth of a degree above absolute zero (0.1 K) on July 3, 2009, placing both the Low Frequency and High Frequency Instruments within their cryogenic operational parameters, making Planck fully operational.
Read more about this topic: Planck (spacecraft)
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