Six months ago, the Webb space telescope was launched from French Guiana to its observation point in space, a million miles from us. Now the first color images of the telescope are finally being taken; will be released to the public on July 12th.
At a press conference today, NASA officials offered a couple of eye-catching details about the images and gave some updates on Webb’s performance. The team announced that the next release will include the deepest image in the universe and that at least one exoplanet spectrum will be included in the images.
“Can you answer some questions we have: where do we come from? What else is out there? Who are we?” NASA administrator Bill Nelson said at the news conference. “In many ways, Webb’s journey has just begun.”
When Webb was launched on December 25, 2021, it was stuck in an Ariane 5 rocket like a very expensive bat in a crawl space. It took him a month to get to L2, where he will remain during his tenure, and he was even photographed right there by a telescope in Italy.
Since then, the public has been getting a steady stream of information about the alignment of Webb’s mirrors and the commissioning of the telescope’s scientific instruments. This culminated in the remarkably sharp image of the Large Magellanic Cloud captured by Webb’s Medium Infrared Instrument (MIRI) in May.
It was a test image, but the images that will arrive on July 12 will be the real deal: the first images of Webb’s scientific goals, as well as the first photos processed in full color. Along with these first images, Webb’s team publishes the results of 120 hours of observations, a delightful first course for astronomers looking forward to looking deeper into the cosmos than ever before.
We still don’t know what exoplanet will be imagined, but we do know why objects like this are observed. The atmospheric chemistry of exoplanets helps planetary scientists understand the true diversity of distant worlds, and astrobiologists can look for water vapor and gases that may indicate the presence of life.
Webb’s images will take stock of the worlds there in great detail, and can work from the list of exoplanets produced by the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite and the Kepler spacecraft, among other missions.
The accuracy of Webb’s launch and the course corrections the telescope had to make cannot be underestimated; enough fuel was saved in the process that Webb should be able to run for at least 20 years.
Webb will periodically pass through debris fields, and even this month he was hit by a micrometeoroid, but Webb’s team can orient the telescope to protect it from the rocky world there. And it will have to be resilient; after years of planning, building, and arguing for funding — and most importantly, waiting — Webb is about to find its time.
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