Planck Early Results: The High Frequency Instrument data processing

We describe the processing of the 334 billion raw data samples from the High Frequency Instrument (hereafter 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 857GHz with an angular resolution ranging from 9.9 to 4.4 arcmin. The white noise level is around 1.5 microK.degree or less in the 3 main CMB channels (100-217GHz). The photometric accuracy is better than 2% at frequencies lower or equal to 353GHz, 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 project.