WMAP satellite Trivia Questions

WMAP was a NASA mission developed by the Goddard Space Flight Center and Princeton University, with contractor support.

WMAP orbited the Sun-Earth L2 Lagrange point, about 1.5 million km from Earth—not around the Moon.

WMAP (launched 2001) cooled its instruments solely via passive radiators, avoiding cryogens. This allowed a longer mission lifetime without coolant depletion.

MAP was renamed the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe in 2003 to honor David T. Wilkinson, a key team member who died in 2002.

WMAP's final analysis in 2012 gave the age of the universe as 13.772 billion years, with just 0.3% uncertainty.

WMAP had a sensitivity of ~20 microKelvin, about one part in 100,000 of the CMB's average temperature (2.725 K), enabling it to map the tiny primordial fluctuations that seeded galaxies.

WMAP's measurements of the cosmic microwave background showed the universe's geometry is nearly flat, with a density parameter very close to 1.

WMAP mapped the cosmic microwave background, not gravitational waves. Primordial gravitational waves from the Big Bang remain undetected; the BICEP2 claim was later retracted due to dust contamination. No satellite has yet made such a detection.