Enlarge / This thin guide sensor test image was acquired in parallel with the NIRCam image of the HD147980 star over an eight-day period in early May.
NASA, CSA and FGS team
We’re just five days away from the public release of the first scientific images from the James Webb Space Telescope, and the anticipation is pretty high. After more than two decades and $ 10 billion, it’s time for Webb to bear fruit.
The first clues are that he will.
On Wednesday evening, NASA released a “test” image of the telescope suggesting that upcoming images and scientific data will be spectacular. The publication of the test photo, which NASA casually says is “among the deepest images in the Universe ever made,” seems almost an inflection because it is very good for an engineering image of throw away.
The space agency picked up the image in late May during a one-week stability test aimed at demonstrating the capabilities of the telescope’s thin guide sensor. This instrument helps Webb find and fix astronomical targets, and was built by the Canadian Space Agency.
Announcements
“The resulting engineering test image has some approximate qualities,” NASA said in a press release. “It was not optimized to be a scientific observation; rather, the data were taken to test the extent to which the telescope could remain locked to a target, but it hints at the power of the telescope. It has some distinctive features of the telescope. Webb has produced during its post-launch preparations.The bright stars stand out with their long, well-defined six diffraction points, an effect due to Webb’s six-sided mirror segments.Beyond the stars, the galaxies they fill almost the entire background “.
Most of the objects in this image are not stars but distant galaxies. These are the types of galaxies that astronomers want to study, as they will reveal information about the early Universe. Because it was only intended for engineering testing, this image does not use color filters that allow astronomers to assess the age of the galaxies in the image, but it does show a detailed structure in distant galaxies.
The stability test was successful, by the way, and Webb has recently been collecting data with all its scientific instruments on and running. We will see the fruits of this work in just five days, starting at 10:30 am ET (14:30 UTC).