Planck images the galaxy's cold dust

PASADENA, Calif., March 17 (UPI) -- The Planck spacecraft -- part of a European Space Agency-led mission -- has nearly completed the first of at least four separate scans of the entire sky.

The spacecraft -- launched by the ESA last May with NASA participation -- has returned a large image that shows tendrils of the cold dusk in our galaxy.

The mission, designed to learn more about the birth of our universe, is to be completed in early 2012.

Scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., said the new image highlights a swath of our Milky Way galaxy occupying about one-thirteenth of the entire sky.

"It shows the bright band of our galaxy's spiral disk amidst swirling clouds where gas and dust mix together and, sometimes, ignite to form new stars," NASA said. "The data were taken in the so-called far-infrared portion of the light spectrum, using two of nine different frequencies available on Planck."

The mission's primary goal is to provide the most detailed information yet about the size, mass, age, geometry, composition and fate of the universe. In addition, Planck will address such astronomy topics as star formation and galactic structure.

"Planck is the first big cosmology mission that will also have a large impact on our understanding of our galaxy, the Milky Way," said Charles Lawrence, the mission's NASA project scientist at JPL.

The new image is available at http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA12964