Norwegian Use of the Planck LFI Instrument.

The European Planck space mission will from the summer of 2008 map in detail the Cosmic Microwave Background with sensitivity and resolution unreachable by any other foreseen experiments, making possible addressing many of the most fundamental questions o f cosmology. Based on the commitment to fund Norwegian participation in the Planck project made by the Research Council of Norway in March 1999, the core of the Electrical Ground Support Equipment for the LFI instrument was built by Norwegian industry, s ecuring full data rights for our group. Simultaneously, we have built up the necessary expertise on working with such data, as shown by our results from the WMAP data. Funded by ESA's PRODEX programme, we have also joined the QUIET ground based polarizati on experiment, that will put us in an even better position for the scientific use of the Planck data. This proposal is for funding the running costs, equipment and manpower that is necessary to bring us from the preparatory phase to the operational post- launch phase of Planck, including getting the first scientific results from the mission. Also, we will provide training for a number of Ph.D. students and post-docs funded by this grant, the Institute of Theoretical Astrophysics and other Research Council grants in a superb international research environment. We will develop the data reduction pipeline for the QUIET experiment and essential data analysis tools, especially within foreground separation, power spectrum estimation and analysis of non-gaussia nities for the Planck consortium, as well as for our own use. The scientific results from QUIET will be published in this period, as well as the initial Planck data.