Planck Mission Images Galactic Web of Cold Dust

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Whitney Clavin 818-354-4673
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
whitney.clavin@jpl.nasa.gov

Image Advisory: 2010-087 March 17, 2010

Planck Mission Images Galactic Web of Cold Dust

The full version of this story with accompanying images is at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2010-087&cid=release_2010-087

Tendrils of the coldest stuff in our galaxy can be seen in a new, large image from Planck, a mission
surveying the whole sky to learn more about the birth of our universe.

Planck, a European Space Agency-led mission with important participation from NASA, launched
into space in May 2009 from Kourou, French Guiana. The space telescope has almost finished its first
of at least four separate scans of the entire sky, a voluminous task that will be completed in early
2012.

The new image, available online at: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/planck/pia12964.html,
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. The data were taken in the so-called far-infrared portion of the light
spectrum, using two of nine different frequencies available on Planck.

"We've got huge amounts of data streaming down from space," said Ulf Israelsson, the NASA project
manager for the mission at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "The intricate process
of sorting through all of it has begun."

The mission's primary objective is to map the cosmic microwave background -- relic radiation left over
from the Big Bang that created our universe about 13.7 billion years ago. Planck's state-of-the-art
technology will provide the most detailed information yet about the size, mass, age, geometry,
composition and fate of the universe.

In addition to cosmological questions like these, the mission will address such astronomy topics as
star formation and galactic structure. Its observations will be used in synergy with data from other
missions, such as the Herschel Space Observatory, another ESA mission with important NASA
participation, and NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope.

"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. "We
can see the cold dust and gas that permeate our galaxy on very large scales, while other missions like
Herschel can zoom in to see the detail."

Planck is scheduled to release a first batch of astronomy data, called the Early Release Compact
Source Catalog, in Jan. 2011. Cosmology results on the first two years' worth of data are expected to
be released in Dec. 2012.

Planck is a European Space Agency mission, with significant participation from NASA. NASA's
Planck Project Office is based at JPL. JPL contributed mission-enabling technology for both of
Planck's science instruments. European, Canadian, U.S. and NASA Planck scientists will work
together to analyze the Planck data. More information is online at http://www.nasa.gov/planck and
http://www.esa.int/planck .

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