The Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE ), also referred to as Explorer 66, was a satellite dedicated to cosmology, which operated from 1989 to 1993. Its goals were to investigate the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB) of the universe and provide measurements that would help shape our understanding of the cosmos.
COBE's measurements provided two key pieces of evidence that supported the Big Bang theory of the universe: that the CMB has a near-perfect black-body spectrum, and that it has very faint anisotropies. Two of COBE's principal investigators, George Smoot and John Mather, received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2006 for their work on the project. According to the Nobel Prize committee, "the COBE-project can also be regarded as the starting point for cosmologyas a precision science".
COBE was the second CMB satellite, following RELIKT-1, and was followed by two more advanced spacecraft: the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe operated from 2001-2010 and the Planck spacecraft from 2009–2013.
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