The James Webb Space Telescope will release its first high-resolution color images on July 12th. One of those images “is the deepest image of our universe ever made,” NASA administrator Bill Nelson said Wednesday during a news conference.
“If you think about it, this is further than humanity has ever moved before,” Nelson said. “And we’re just beginning to understand what Webb can and will do. It will explore objects in the solar system and atmospheres of exoplanets orbiting other stars, giving us clues as to whether their atmospheres are potentially similar to ours.”
Nelson, who shared that he tested positive for Covid-19 Tuesday night, was unable to attend the event in person at the Baltimore Space Telescope Science Institute.
The Webb mission, which was estimated to last 10 years, has enough excess fuel capacity to run for 20 years, according to NASA Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy.
Meanwhile, Webb’s team is finalizing the final steps to prepare the observatory and its instruments for collecting scientific data, which should be completed next week, said Bill Ochs, director of NASA’s Webb project.
The observatory is operating even better than expected, mission engineers said. And the team continues to work on developing strategies to prevent micrometeoroid impacts, such as the one that sank part of Webb’s mirror in May.
What to expect
The space observatory, which launched in December, will be able to look into the atmospheres of exoplanets and observe some of the first galaxies created after the universe began observing them through infrared light, which is invisible to the Earth. human eye.
Webb began making his first images a couple of weeks ago, and is still capturing some of the images that will be shared on July 12th. This package of color images will be the result of 120 hours of observation, about five days of observation. data.
The telescope’s initial goal was to see the first stars and galaxies in the universe, basically observing “the universe lights up for the first time,” said Eric Smith, a Webb program scientist and chief scientist of the Division. of NASA Astrophysics.
The exact number and nature of the images have not been shared, but “each of them will reveal different aspects of the universe with unprecedented detail and sensitivity,” said Klaus Pontoppidan, a Webb project scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute.
The first release will highlight Webb’s scientific abilities, as well as the ability of his large golden mirror and his scientific instruments to produce spectacular images.
The images will show how galaxies interact and grow and how collisions between galaxies drive star formation, as well as examples of the violent life cycle of stars. And we can expect to see the first spectrum of an exoplanet, or how the wavelengths of light and different colors reveal features of other worlds.
Nearby infrared imaging instrument and telescope slotless spectrograph has completed preparations this week. The instrument will be able to use a specialized prism to scatter light collected from cosmic sources to create three different rainbows that reveal shades of more than 2,000 infrared colors from a single observation.
This is especially useful when observing exoplanets to determine if they have an atmosphere and to select atoms and molecules within it when starlight shines through the atmosphere to determine its composition.
Looking ahead
The best part is that Webb’s team is just at the beginning of the mission and the data collected by the space observatory will be made public so that scientists around the world “can embark on a journey of shared discovery,” he said. Pontoppidan.
The data collected by Webb will allow scientists to make accurate measurements of planets, stars and galaxies in a way that had never been possible, said Susan Mullally, assistant scientist for the Webb project at the Space Telescope Science Institute.
“Webb can look back in time just after the big bang looking for galaxies so far away that light has taken many billions of years to reach from these galaxies to ourselves,” said Jonathan Gardner, senior project assistant scientist Webb at NASA. .
Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA’s Scientific Mission Directorate, has seen some of the first images to be shared on July 12th.
“It’s an emotional moment when you see nature suddenly releasing some of its secrets,” Zurbuchen said Wednesday. “With this telescope, it’s very hard not to break records.”