The James Webb Space Telescope will release its first high-resolution color images on July 12. One of those images “is the deepest image of our universe ever made,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson told a news conference Wednesday.
“If you think about it, it’s farther than humanity has ever moved,” Nelson said. “And we’re just beginning to understand what the Web can and will do. It will explore objects in the solar system and the atmospheres of exoplanets orbiting other stars, giving us clues as to whether their atmospheres are potentially similar to ours.”
Nelson, who said he tested positive for Covid-19 on Tuesday night, was unable to attend the event in person at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore.
The Web mission, which is estimated to last 10 years, has enough excess fuel capacity to run for 20 years, according to NASA Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy.
Meanwhile, the Webb team is finalizing the final steps to prepare the observatory and its scientific data collection tools, which should be completed next week, said Bill Oaks, NASA’s Webb project manager.
The observatory is performing even better than expected, the mission’s engineers said. And the team continues to work on developing strategies to avoid micrometeorological impacts, such as the one that smashed part of the Web mirror in May.
What to expect
The space observatory, which launches in December, will be able to peek into the atmospheres of exoplanets and observe some of the first galaxies created since the beginning of the universe, observing them through infrared light that is invisible to the human eye.
Webb started making his first images a few 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 data value.
The telescope’s original purpose was to see the first stars and galaxies in the universe, essentially observing “the universe turns on the lights for the first time,” said Eric Smith, a Webb scientist and chief scientist in NASA’s astrophysics department.
The exact number and nature of the images have not been shared, but “each will reveal different aspects of the universe with unprecedented detail and sensitivity,” said Klaus Pontopidan, a Webb scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute.
The first edition will highlight Webb’s scientific capabilities, as well as the ability of its massive gold mirror and scientific tools to produce spectacular images.
The images will show how galaxies interact and grow and how collisions between galaxies lead to 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 wavelengths of light and different colors reveal the characteristics of other worlds.
The near-infrared imager and slit-free spectrograph on the telescope 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 arcs that reveal shades of more than 2,000 infrared colors from a single observation.
This is especially handy when observing exoplanets to determine if they have an atmosphere – and selecting atoms and molecules in it when starlight shines through the atmosphere to determine its composition.
Look forward
Best of all, the Webb team is only 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 shared journey of discovery,” Pontopidan said.
The data collected by Webb will allow scientists to make accurate measurements of planets, stars and galaxies in a way that has never been possible before, said Susan Mulally, a deputy scientist on the Webb project at the Space Telescope Science Institute.
“The Web can look back in time immediately after the Big Bang, looking for galaxies that are so far away that light has taken billions of years to reach us from those galaxies,” said Jonathan Gardner, Webb’s deputy senior scientist. at NASA. .
Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA’s scientific missions directorate, saw some of the first images to be shared on July 12.
“This is an emotional moment when you see nature suddenly reveal some of its secrets,” Zurbuchen said on Wednesday. “It’s really hard not to break records with this telescope.
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