WMAP is in the Guinness Book of World Records for “most accurate measure of the age of the universe.” The mission established that the cosmos is 13.75 billion years old, with a degree of error of one percent. As the universe expanded over the next 13 billion years, this light lost energy and stretched into increasingly longer wavelengths. WMAP detects a signal that is the remnant afterglow of the hot young universe, a pattern frozen in place when the cosmos was only 380,000 years old. “We launched this mission in 2001, accomplished far more than our initial science objectives, and now the time has come for a responsible conclusion to the satellite’s operations,” said Charles Bennett, WMAP’s principal investigator at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. 8, the satellite fired its thrusters, left its working orbit, and entered into a permanent parking orbit around the sun. WMAP acquired its final science data on Aug. The WMAP team has answered many longstanding questions about the universe’s age and composition. WMAP was designed to provide a more detailed look at subtle temperature differences in the cosmic microwave background that were first detected in 1992 by NASA’s Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE). “The team is still busy analyzing the complete nine-year set of data, which the scientific community eagerly awaits.” “WMAP has opened a window into the earliest universe that we could scarcely imagine a generation ago,” said Gary Hinshaw, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., who manages the mission.
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