Today Was A Good Day For Science/Me

Today the Planck Satellite and the Herschel Space Observatory were successfully launched.

This is good for science because the Planck satellite will study the CMB better than ever which should pin down some very important questions, especially the nature of inflation and gravitational waves. (Inflation may get some real corrective surgery from this information and seeing gravity waves would be amazing.) The Herschel Space Observatory should be able to study early star/galaxy formation better than anything thus far. (Hopefully.)

This is good for me since I am part of the Herschel Team (well, if not officially yet, it will be soon. They sent me a T-shirt a week ago.) and have a grant proposal being submitted tomorrow to study things I am going to remain silent on that will have a lot to do with the Planck satellite. (I don't want to comment on it in case it affects grant proposal committees to see things written on blogs.) I was invited to a launch party at JPL/Caltech, and.... I didn't go. It was at 5:00am!

Here are the videos. To be honest, I don't know how they do this. Look how perfectly everything follows the predicted curves. Absolutely amazing. They have people a lot smarter than me working there.