It sounds like an awfully hard thing to do, but the WMAP NASA satellite is doing a damned good job at constraining some of the most important values of our Universe. This busy little fellah maps the sky every 6 months from its perfect position 1,5 million kilometers from the Earth. In this position, called the L2 Lagrangian point, the probe follows the Earth around the Sun and points its sensitive intruments away from the destructive light from the Sun, the Moon and the Earth at all time.

On February 28 2008, NASA released the results from the 5-year data of the satellite, and once again it astounds the World with its detailed measurements of the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation, which is like the faint afterglow of the birth of the Universe, the so called Big Bang.

Details are at the WMAP webpage, but some of the highlights include an age determination of the Universe of unseen precision: 13,72 billion years old within 1% of error, and when we’re talking about the grand old Universe, that precision is quite a feat!

In a not so distant future, reducedmass.com is planning to post an article on basic cosmology, explaining to you all of the amazing WMAP results and what they mean for our understanding of the Universe we live in.