Editorial - Thank You and Good Luck
Try saying it aloud. Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe. It’s a mouthful, which is why it is usually called W.M.A.P., the abbreviation for a satellite that was launched in June 2001 and retired this September.
From its spot in space — at a place of neutral gravity known as the L2 Lagrange Point — W.M.A.P. did one thing spectacularly well: it observed minute fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background, the heat remaining from the Big Bang.
It is hard to overstate just how far this one small satellite has carried us in our understanding of the history of the universe, its character and origin.
It has been little more than half a century since the cosmic background radiation, the residual temperature of the universe, was first discovered. W.M.A.P. succeeded in measuring it in remarkable detail, beyond its designers’ wildest hopes.
There are still many, many mysteries. But suddenly it was possible to say with real precision just how old the universe is — 13.75 billion years — and that it was made up of measurable percentages of things we still don’t understand: 73 percent dark energy and 22.4 dark matter. Only 4.6 percent is the ordinary kind of matter we actually know something about.
W.M.A.P. has been succeeded by the European Space Agency’s Planck spacecraft, launched in May 2009. And so it gets a dignified and well-deserved retirement. The thrusters that kept it in place have been fired a final time, moving it into a steady orbit around the sun, as if it were just another member of the solar system.
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