Introduction

The Explanatory Supplement is the reference text to the public data products derived from data acquired by the European Space Agency’s Planck satellite during its mission.

The main purpose of this document is to describe the Planck public data products. However, it also provides information on the hardware and the pipelines used in the acquisition and processing of the data.

Given the number and diversity of products made available in this release, the descriptions offered here for each product are not always exhaustive, but they try to cover in every case the most immediate needs of the user: what a product consists of; what the limitations and caveats are for each product; and what the format of each data file is. On top of this basic information, the user is also offered a summary of the production process for each product. For details, users are advised to consult the Planck papers accompanying the data release.

Given the format in which this document is provided to the scientific community, a wiki, we will perform updates of its contents every time products are updated or added, every time more information becomes available, and at every major data release.