Planck is a European Space Agency (ESA) satellite, launched in May 2009, which will map the cosmic microwave background anisotropies in intensity and polarisation with unprecedented detail and sensitivity. It will also provide full-sky maps of astrophysical foregrounds. An accurate knowledge of the telescope beam patterns is an essential element for a correct analysis of the acquired astrophysical data. We present a detailed description of the optical design of the High Frequency Instrument (HFI) together with some of the optical performances measured during the calibration campaigns. We report on the evolution of the knowledge of the pre-launch HFI beam patterns when coupled to ideal telescope elements, and on their significance for the HFI data analysis procedure.

The ESA Planck satellite has begun studying the anisotropies of the cosmic microwave background radiation over the whole sky with unprecedented sensitivity and high angular resolution. The High Frequency Instrument, HFI, on Planck is observing simultaneously in six bands

Private health insurance membership declined steadily between 1984 and 1997, after which major government interventions caused it to increase. We review some of the literature and conclude that the increases in membership were probably associated with a loss of equity and cost-effectiveness for the health care system as a whole. We attempt to explain why the government made the changes and conclude that the main factors were vested interests of those who have benefited and a confusion of objectives. The changes may have resulted in a more balanced use of available resources (such as the balance between government and private hospital utilisation) but these and other desirable objectives might have been better achieved in other ways. We advocate that a more serious effort be made in future to ensure that policy takes more account of evidence, logic, and system-wide design and coherence.

We describe the processing of the 336 billion raw data samples from the High Frequency Instrument (HFI) which we performed to produce six temperature maps from the first 295 days of Planck-HFI survey data. These maps provide an accurate rendition of the sky emission at 100, 143, 217, 353, 545 and 857 GHz with an angular resolution ranging from 9.9 to 4.4 . The white noise level is around 1.5 μK degree or less in the 3 main CMB channels (100-217 GHz). The photometric accuracy is better than 2% at frequencies between 100 and 353 GHz and around 7% at the two highest frequencies. The maps created by the HFI Data Processing Centre reach our goals in terms of sensitivity, resolution, and photometric accuracy. They are already sufficiently accurate and well-characterised to allow scientific analyses which are presented in an accompanying series of early papers. At this stage, HFI data appears to be of high quality and we expect that with further refinements of the data processing we should be able to achieve, or exceed, the science goals of the Planck project.

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