Nasa will reveal the “deepest picture of the cosmos” on July 12, the first of the agency’s $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope’s scientific photos.
On July 12, it James Webb Space Telescope will release its first high-resolution colour photos. NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said during a press conference on Wednesday that one of these photographs is “the deepest view of our cosmos yet captured.”
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Nelson said, “If you think about it, this is beyond what mankind has ever gone before.” “We are only starting to comprehend what Webb can and will do.” He will look at things in our solar system and the atmospheres of exoplanets that orbit other stars. This could show if their atmospheres are similar to ours.
Pam Melroy, who is the deputy administrator of NASA, says that the Webb mission, which was supposed to last ten years, has enough fuel to last twenty.
Bill Ochs, NASA’s Webb project manager, said that the Webb team is ironing out the last issues of prepping the observatory and its sensors for scientific data gathering, which should be completed next week.
According to mission engineers, the performance of the observatory exceeds expectations. And the team is still looking for ways to stop small meteorites from hitting the telescope, like the one that broke a part of the Webb telescope’s mirror in May.
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Things to anticipate
The space observatory, which was launched in December, will use infrared light, which humans can’t see, to look into the atmospheres of exoplanets and see some of the first galaxies to form after the universe was born.
Webb began shooting his initial photographs a few weeks ago, and he is still collecting some of those that will be released on July 12. This collection of colour photos is the product of 120 hours of observation, or around five days’ worth of data.
The original objective of the telescope was to see the earliest stars and galaxies in the cosmos or to witness “the universe switching on its lights for the first time,” according to Eric Smith, Webb programmer scientist and head scientist of NASA’s Astrophysics Division.
The actual number and type of the photos have not been disclosed, but Klaus Pontoppidan, Webb project scientist at the Telescope Science Institute, said that “each one will show distinct parts of the cosmos with unparalleled clarity and sensitivity.” Space the first book will focus on Webb’s scientific skills and the amazing photos that can be taken with its huge golden mirror and scientific equipment.
The photos will demonstrate how galaxies interact and expand; how collisions between galaxies drive star formation; and the violent life cycle of stars. And we may be able to witness the first spectrum of an exoplanet, or how the wavelengths and hues of light disclose the characteristics of distant planets.
This week, preparations for the telescope’s instruments, a near-infrared imager and a slitless spectrograph (FGS-NIRISS), were completed. In a single observation, the equipment will be able to use a custom-made prism to split light from outer space into three different rainbows that show more than 2,000 infrared colour tones.
This is especially important when looking at exoplanets to see if they have an atmosphere and figuring out what it is made of by looking at the atoms and molecules in the atmosphere when the sun shines through them.
Considering the future
The data acquired by the space observatory will be made available so that scientists from across the globe may “begin a voyage of discovery together.”
Scientists will be able to measure planets, stars, and galaxies with an accuracy that has never been seen before, says Susan Mullally, the deputy project scientist for Webb at the Space Telescope Science Institute.
“Webb can go back in time, shortly after the Big Bang, in search of galaxies so far that it took light billions of years to reach us,” said Jonathan Gardner, the project’s deputy scientist. Webb at NASA.
The associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Thomas Zurbuchen, has seen some of the first photographs to be released on July 12.
On Wednesday, Zurbuchen said, “It’s a thrilling time when nature unexpectedly reveals some of its mysteries.” With this telescope, it is almost impossible not to shatter records.
