NASA pulls back the curtain on a unique photo gallery and tomorrow presents the first color images from its James Webb Space Telescope, a revolutionary device designed to peer across the cosmos towards the dawn of the universe.
The highly anticipated unveiling of photos and spectroscopic data from the newly operational observatory follows a six-month process of remotely unfolding various components, aligning the mirrors and calibrating instruments.
Now that Webb is fine-tuned and fully focused, astronomers will embark on a competitively selected list of science projects investigating the evolution of galaxies, the life cycles of stars, the atmospheres of distant exoplanets and the moons of our outer solar system.
The first batch of photos is expected to provide a compelling look at what Webb will capture on the missions ahead.
On Friday, NASA posted a list of the five celestial bodies chosen for its showcase debut of Webb, built for the US space agency by aerospace giant Northrop Grumman.
Among them are two nebulae — huge clouds of gas and dust blown into space by stellar explosions that form nurseries for new stars — and two sets of galaxy clusters.
One, according to NASA, has foreground objects so massive that they act as “gravity lenses,” a visual distortion of space that vastly magnifies light coming from behind to expose even fainter objects further away and further back in time. lay . How far back and what was on camera remains to be seen.
NASA will also publish Webb’s first spectrographic analysis of an exoplanet, revealing the molecular signatures of patterns of filtered light passing through its atmosphere.
The exoplanet in this case, about half the mass of Jupiter, is more than 1,100 light-years away. A light year is the distance light travels in a year – 5.9 trillion miles or 9.5 trillion km.
All five of the Webb’s preliminary goals were previously known to scientists. One of them, the galaxy group 290 million light-years from Earth, known as Stephan’s Quintet, was first discovered in 1877.
But NASA officials promise that Webb’s images literally take the subjects in a whole new light.
“What I saw moved me as a scientist, an engineer and a human being,” Nasa deputy administrator Pam Melroy, who viewed the footage, told reporters.
Klaus Pontoppidan, a Webb project scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, where mission control engineers operate the telescope, has promised the first images would “provide a much-anticipated ‘wow’ for astronomers and the public.”
The $9 billion infrared telescope, the largest and most complex astronomical observatory ever sent to space, was launched on Christmas Day from French Guiana in South America.
A month later, the 6.350 kg instrument reached its gravity parking lot in orbit around the sun and, along with the earth, orbited the sun for nearly 1.6 million km from home.
The telescope is named after James E. Webb, who was NASA’s administrator during the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs from 1961 to 1968.