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On Saturday, 1.5-million kilometres from Earth, at a place known as the L2 Lagrangian Point, where the Planck Satellite orbits the sun in lockstep with the Earth, a tank of liquid helium coolant went dry.

Immediately, a camera that had been chilled by the helium to -270 degrees Celsius started to warm up from the sun’s light, and as it did, an array of highly sensitive microwave radiation detectors known as spider-web bolometers became too warm to detect the faint, lingering flash of the Big Bang, an ancient light that fills the sky.

Thus ended the working life of the Planck Surveyor, a European satellite that took the most expensive single picture in history, and which soon will use a bit of remaining fuel to propel itself toward cremation in the sun.

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Another camera on board, the Low Frequency Instrument, still works, and will be allowed to run out its lifespan of a few more months. But the death-by-sunlight of the High Frequency Instrument marks the functional end of an experiment that looked farther than any other, literally as far as possible.