RELIKT-1
Encyclopedia
RELIKT-1 - a Soviet
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....

 cosmic microwave background anisotropy experiment on board the Prognoz 9
Prognoz 9
Prognoz 9 was a satellite launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome on July 1, 1983, using a Molniya-M/8K78M-SOL carrier rocket. The satellite mass was 1060 kg. Orbital parameters attained: highly eccentric orbit periapsis 380.0 km, apoapsis 720000.0 km, period 38448.0 min , inclination...

 satellite (launched 1 July 1983) gave upper limits on the large-scale anisotropy. A reanalysis of the data in the later years claimed a confident blackbody form and anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation. Results have been published in January 1992, issue 4/1992 of the "Science in USSR" journal. Nevertheless, the Nobel Prize in Physics for 2006 was awarded to a team of American scientists, who announced the fact on April 23, 1992 based on data taken by the COBE
COBE
The COsmic Background Explorer , also referred to as Explorer 66, was a satellite dedicated to cosmology. Its goals were to investigate the cosmic microwave background radiation of the universe and provide measurements that would help shape our understanding of the cosmos.This work provided...

 spacecraft.

This experiment was prepared by the Space Research Institute of the USSR Academy of Sciences and supervised by Dr. Igor Strukov.

A map of the sky at 37 GHz was built using an 8 mm band Dicke-type modulation radiometer. The radiometer could not conduct multi-band astronomical observations. The entire sky was observed in 6 months. The angular resolution was 5.5 degrees, with a temperature resolution of 0.6 mK.

The galactic microwave flux was measured and the CMB dipole observed. A quadrupole moment was found between 17 and 95 microkelvins rms
Root mean square
In mathematics, the root mean square , also known as the quadratic mean, is a statistical measure of the magnitude of a varying quantity. It is especially useful when variates are positive and negative, e.g., sinusoids...

, with 90% confidence level.

The heat radiation map of the Universe served as the emblem of the 1989 international conference "The Cosmic Wave Background: 25 Years Later" in L'Aquila, Italy.

The discovery of anisotropy by the RELIKT-1 spacecraft was first reported officially in January 1992 at the Moscow astrophysical seminar.

As a follow-up to RELIKT-1, it was decided in 1986 to study the anisotropy of CMB as part of the Relikt-2 project. The sensitivity of the equipment had greatly increased. The spacecraft was scheduled to launch in 1993-1994, but the launch never took place because of the Soviet Union's break-up and lack of funding.

External links

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