Mission products

The products of the Planck mission that are made public at this time and described in this document consist of:

• signal and pointing timelines, accompanied by the relevant flags, which can be used to build maps in addition to those supplied here;
• different types of sky maps, i.e., maps of the signal received from the sky, accompanied by;
• various catalogues of point sources, one per frequency band, and of the SZ clusters (of which there are several compiled with different extraction methods);
• a set of astrophysical component maps, which attempt to separate the different astrophysical components, namely the CMB and several foreground components;
• a CMB power spectrum, the best the DPCs could produce at this time.

and more

To support the interpretation of these data, these products are accompanied by:

• instrument-level data (beam properties, noise levels, bandpass profiles, and more) compiled into the Reduced Instrument Model, or RIMO, of which there is one per instrument.
• the effective beams

Two software packages are also included as Mission Products:

• the Likelihood code package, which is itself split into a software package and a data package,
• the Unit Conversion and Color Correction (UcCC) package, which is used together with the bandpass profiles in the RIMO.

The data products are packaged into FITS files that contain a main product (e.g., a signal map) and one or more other products to characterize it (e.g., a variance map, a hit-count map, a beam window function). Depending on the details of the products, the data are written into a single BINTABLE or a few extensions, or an IMAGE extension. The RIMO is also packaged into a FITS file, but given the nature of its different elements it was necessary to use several hundred BINTABLE extensions.

The software is delivered as a tarball of code, and if necessary a second tarball of associated data is also delivered. The details depend on the code and are described elsewhere in this document.

This chapter is divided by type of product. Each section contains a brief description of how each type of product is obtained, while the details of the processing are given in the HFI Data Processing and LFI Data Processing chapters. Each section also lists any known problems with the product. The structure of the FITS files are given and explained, as are the main header keywords.

A very brief description of how to start using the PLA can be found in the PLA appendix. The PLA software provides a more extensive user guide.