COBE was originally planned to be launched on a Space Shuttle in 1988, but the Challenger explosion delayed this plan when the Shuttles were grounded.
The COBE satellite was launched in the early 90's to get a map of the Microwave Background Radiation that permeates the sky. It used all sorts of advanced gadgets, like a supercooled dewar full of liquid helium that contained the detectors.
COBE
Coherence
The existence of a correlation (statistical or temporal) between the phases of two or more waves.
COBE
COBE (Cosmic Background Explorer) is a NASA satellite that was launched in 1992. COBE detected extremely fluctuations (anisotropy), in the cosmic microwave background (the heat left over from the Big Bang).
COBE was the first satellite to study the cosmic microwave fossil. In 1992, COBE found that there were slight temperature differences in this evenly spread blanket of light. The Universe has cooled down considerably since its early days.
COBE finally went into space in 1989. Soon, COBE found exactly what John was looking for. It told scientists a lot about how the universe began. The satellite found strong proof for the big bang.
COBE
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Go to Imagine the Universe! (A site for ages 14 and up.) ...
COBE: The COsmic Background Explorer. COBE was launched into Earth orbit in 1989 to image the cosmic background radiation.
Comet: A comet is a ball of icy material with a higly eccentic elliptical orbit around the Sun.
COBE carried three primary instruments that could detect any electromagnetic radiation with wavelengths between 1 and 10,000 microns (1 micron="1 millionth" of 1 m).
The COBE satellite carried instrumentation aboard that allowed it to measure small fluctuations in intensity of the background radiation, ...
If the COBE results hold up"as they are checked and rechecked by collaborators and competitors alike"they may one day come to rank alongside the discovery of the microwave background itself in terms of their importance to the field of cosmology.
DIRBE Team, COBE, NASA -- larger infrared mage.
The S-shaped blue band is zodiacal light from dust within
Jupiter's orbit (more at Astronomy Picture of the Day).
Following in COBE's footsteps - the MAP mission
A Matter of Scale - interactive showing the sizes of things, from very tiny to huge - from NSF ...
The data from COBE match the theoretical blackbody curve so exactly that it is impossible to distinguish the data from the curve.
Credit: NASA/COBE ...
The radiation COBE observed was almost equally bright in all directions ("isotropic"), but not completely so: a small unevenness ("anisotropy") remained, and MAP is designed to observe it better.
Inspired by the COBE results, a series of ground and balloon-based experiments measured cosmic microwave background anisotropies on smaller angular scales over the next decade.
^ "Dipole Anisotropy in the COBE Differential Microwave Radiometers First-Year Sky Maps" Kogut, et al Astrophysical Journal, 1993
^ a b Zeilik, Michael A.; Gregory, Stephan A. (1998). Introductory Astronomy & Astrophysics (4th ed.).
The best-known maps of fluctuations in the background are from the COBE Differential Microwave Radiometer (DMR). These images illustrate the four-year data products as measured at 53 GHz, in galactic coordinates with the galactic center in the middle.
The resolution of the COBE satellite was about 7 degrees---not good enough to definitively measure the angular sizes of the fluctuations.
In 1989 the COBE - Cosmic Background Explorer - satellite was launched. Unlike observations from the ground, the CBR could be observed by COBE in all directions and at very high precision.
In 1989 the second IR satellite, the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE), was launched by NASA.
Unfortunately, subsequent measurements of large-scale structure in the galaxy distribution from redshift surveys and, perhaps most importantly, the ripples seen by the COBE satellite, have effectively ruled out the CDM model.
Of these experiments, the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite that was flown in 1989-1996 is probably the most famous and which made the first detection of the large scale anisotropies (other than the dipole).
the COBE/DIRBE Science Team, and NASA
To the left is an infrared image of the entire sky from the COBE satellite. The bright band in the middle of the image is our Milky Way galaxy.
This map, made from data gathered by the COBE spacecraft, shows the intensity of the left-over radiation from a period not long after the Big Bang.
This image of our galaxy, the Milky Way, was taken with NASA's Cosmic Background Explorer's (COBE) Diffuse Infrared Background Experiment (DIRBE).
Huge advances in Big Bang cosmology were made in the late 1990s and the early 21st century as a result of major advances in telescope technology in combination with large amounts of satellite data, such as that from COBE and the Hubble Space ...
Penzias & Wilson (1963); COBE (1990)
whole sky : black body spectrum, T=2.7K
recombination in 3000K gas; hot fog cools & clears
redshift factor ~ 1000; 300,000 yrs after BB
small dipole -----
MW drift motion (~ 600 km/s) ...
The first such was COBE, which stands for COsmic Background Explorer. It presented the first all-sky picture of the CMB, but its resolution was too poor to accurately determine the geometry (temperature resolution was about 0.
The map was compiled from data from COBE, a satellite launched in 1989. It measured variations in the cosmic microwave background, the faint "afterglow" of the Big Bang, which fills the universe.
The radiation was detected in the sub-millimeter and its average spectrum measured by two COBE experiments.
 See also: Universe, Background, Satellite, Galaxies, Earth
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