You can follow more about these missions on their blogs:

http://planckmission.wordpress.com/

http://herschelmission.wordpress.com/

which I help maintain.

A great bit of science there, well done ESA.

Fingers crossed for the launch, eh?

What? Who comes up with these acronyms?? Why do we not have a Nebula Observation Belt? Or a Far Away Reflective Telescope?? Or even a Primary Infra-red Space Spectrometer??

I think there should be a think tank for this.

Paris, 'cos she's got a Bright Energy Analogous Vector Enhancement Ray (or something)!

That's all.

@ DL - Cheers!

I presume these scopes are destined to *orbit* L2 rather than occupy it. Might end up a bit of a squeeze once Herschel, Planck, Eddington, Gaia, the James Webb Space Telescope and Darwin all take up residence.

Incidentally, I think it's rather neat that L2 is 1.01 AU from the Sun. There's something pleasing about the ratio between the gravitational strength of the Earth-Moon system and the Sun. A bit like the coincidence of the Sun and Moon's apparent size, which makes for such striking solar eclipses.

You rock man, you must work at NASA or ESA. They will have to rename any missions just because of you!!!

Annex the lagrange points before the military get their mitts on it!

I know I shouldn't have, but I immediately thought of Agatha Heterodyne: http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/

They should have got Phil Foglio to design the emblem for them.

The scientist, because it's the nearest thing they have to a Spark.