  Planck was successfully launched on May 14th, 2009, from the Kourou space
port, in French Guyana. After recalling the objectives that we set out - back
in 1996 - to fulfill with this project, I recall some of the technological
breakthroughs which needed to be made and report on the exciting scientific
outlook of the project in light of the knowledge we now have of the actual
performances of the two on-board instruments. I also include one of our more
recent results even though it was not yet available at the time of the
conference.
