A spacecraft that revealed details of the hidden tapestry of the infant cosmos has had its last hurrah.
Scientists have unveiled the final result from the European Space Agency’s Planck satellite, which observed the oldest light in the universe — the cosmic microwave background — from 2009 to 2013. During its mission, the spacecraft provided new details of the intricate patterns woven into that light, across the entire sky. Now, a collection of postmortem papers posted July 17 at arXiv.org are the putting the finishing touches on the measurements, released in a series of studies beginning in 2010 (SN Online: 7/5/10).