Hailed as the world’s leading space observatory, Webb has successfully completed a number of steps over the past few months that have been crucial in aligning its 18 gold mirror segments.
The mirror is so large that it had to be folded to fit inside the rocket for the December 25 launch. After reaching orbit a million miles from Earth in January, Webb began the careful process of unfolding and aligning his mirror.
The first high-resolution images that the Web collects from space are not expected until the end of June, as the observatory’s instruments have yet to be calibrated. But test results released by NASA on Thursday show clear, well-focused images that the observatory’s four instruments can capture. Together, these images share the entire field of view of the telescope. Webb mirrors direct focused light from space at each instrument, and these instruments capture images.
For the test, Webb observed a small neighboring satellite galaxy called the Large Magellanic Cloud. The dense field of the galaxy of hundreds of thousands of stars can be seen in the test images.
“These remarkable test images from a successfully aligned telescope demonstrate what people from different countries and continents can achieve when they have a bold scientific vision for space exploration,” said Lee Feinberg, element manager of the Webb optical telescope at NASA’s Space Flight Center. Goddard.
The telescope team expects that the observatory may even exceed the goals it was supposed to achieve, because it is already working better than expected.
“These images have profoundly changed the way I see the universe,” said Scott Acton, a Webb wavefront scientist at Ball Aerospace. “We are surrounded by a symphony of creation; galaxies are everywhere! I hope everyone in the world can see them.”
An earlier image shared in March also showed that Webb could use individual segments of its mirror as a giant 21-foot, 4-inch (6.5-meter) mirror and capture one-star light.
Over the next few months, the team will ensure that all scientific instruments are calibrated.
Each tool has a number of specialized detectors with customized equipment to help achieve Webb’s scientific goals, and all tools must be configured before they can be declared ready.
And this summer we will see the first flashes of the Web that could unlock the mysteries of the universe.
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