Mission products

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

• different types of sky maps, i.e., maps of the unpolarized 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 foregrounds;
• a dust opacity map and model derived from the dust component but using also external information;
• a set of sky power spectra obtained from selected combinations of detectors, which are for use in likelihood studies;
• a CMB power spectrum, the best the DPCs could produce at this time.

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.

There are no low-level science products in this release of Planck data, in particular no timeline data (detector signal, pointing, housekeeping), and in general no instrument data at the single detector level.

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 and a hit-count map). 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 contain 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, and any known problems with the product. The list of product files is then given, and sample FITS headers are given and explained.

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.