How NASA’s Webb Telescope Photos Were Selected

Even getting to this point had taken decades of planning, looming cancellations, delays on delays, a pandemic and a round of harrowing inverted origami it took to unfold the telescope into deep space without breaking it. In Baltimore, this group’s job was a mix of on-the-fly science, public communication, and brand management: to confuse everyone, show policymakers what all those credits had paid for, and assure the rest of the scientific world that yes. Some of the universe’s most elusive secrets could finally be within reach.

The still-functioning predecessor to the new telescope, Hubble — now 32 years old, firmly in its millennium generation — had underlined the commitment. The first images from Hubble made it clear that the mirror was flawed, which angered Congress and turned the project into a punch line. But after successful repairs, scientists working on Hubble continued to capture breathtaking, protoviral images of galaxies and nebulae like the “pillars of creation,inspired countless careers in the sciences. (Mine included: Before becoming a science journalist, I spent two years as a data analyst for Hubble, which is also run by the Space Telescope Science Institute.)

But James Webb is a very different beast, so distinctive and sophisticated in its capabilities that even experienced astronomers had no idea what to expect from the images it would yield. Much of that is because the Webb operates at infrared wavelengths. At these frequencies, inaccessible to human eyes, clouds that seem solid to Hubble dissolve into wisps of cirrus, distant galaxies brighten, new details emerge from the black, and space itself is illuminated by the light of organic molecules dying in the last breath. of dying stars.

Just showing off this stuff would require a clear color palette and style. NASA wanted to release the first images within six weeks of the telescope coming online. And while staring into the abyss of the cosmic sublime for weeks would have its benefits, the silence surrounding the project could also be lonely.

In early June, for example, Klaus Pontoppidan, the astronomer who led this early release team, was the first human to download the full “deep field” image from the new telescope. This long, penetrating look at distant galaxies peers further back to the beginning of time and the edge of space than any instrument of mankind has ever succeeded. “I sat staring at that for two hours, then desperately, desperately wanted to share it with someone,” he said. “But I couldn’t.”