Herschel Space Observatory is the European Space Agency's fourth "Cornerstone Mission". NASA is a partner in the Herschel mission, and the NASA Herschel Science Center is located at IPAC.

Planck's objective is to analyze, with the highest accuracy ever achieved, the remnants of the radiation that filled the Universe immediately after the Big Bang, which we observe today as the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). The US Planck Data Center is located at IPAC, and IPAC generated the Early Release Compact Source Catalog (ERCSC), the first public data product from the mission.