The Planck mission

Abstract

These lecture from the 100th Les Houches summer school on "Post-planck cosmology" of July 2013 discuss some aspects of the Planck mission, whose prime objective was a very accurate measurement of the temperature anisotropies of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). We announced our findings a few months ago, on March 21$^{st}$, 2013. I describe some of the relevant steps we took to obtain these results, sketching the measurement process, how we processed the data to obtain full sky maps at 9 different frequencies, and how we extracted the CMB temperature anisotropies map and angular power spectrum. I conclude by describing some of the main cosmological implications of the statistical characteristics of the CMB we found. Of course, this is a very much shortened and somewhat biased view of the \Planck\ 2013 results, written with the hope that it may lead some of the students to consult the original papers.