NASA to show first full color image of the Webb space telescope

The James Webb Space Telescope, the most powerful ever sent into orbit, will reveal a stunning new view of the universe with never-before-seen clarity.

The photos are hoped to provide an interesting picture of what Webb will capture in the science mission that lies ahead. (Reuters)

Pulling the curtain back on a photo gallery like no other, NASA will soon present the first full-color images of the James Webb Space Telescope, a revolutionary tool that has been designed to peer through the cosmos into the dawn of the universe.

The highly anticipated release of spectroscopic images and data on July 12 from the newly operational observatory follows a six-month process of remotely stretching various components, aligning mirrors and their calibration instruments.

With Webb now fine tuned and fully focused, astronomers will embark on a list of competitively selected science projects exploring the evolution of galaxies, the life cycles of stars, the atmospheres of distant exoplanets, and the moons of our outer solar system.

The first batch of photos, which took weeks to process from raw telescope data, are expected to offer an interesting glimpse into what Webb will capture in the science missions that lie ahead.

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The wait is almost over!

Webb’s first full set of images & data will be revealed in less than 2 days. On July 12, watch our broadcast LIVE at 10:30 a.m. ET (14:30 UTC) on one of the @NASAstreaming platforms, including Twitter. Countdown with us: https://t.co/CfvDXKW8hG pic.twitter.com/mTnLs8ofdv

— NASA Webb Telescope (@NASAWebb) 11 July 2022

Heavenly Subject

NASA on Friday posted a list of five celestial objects selected for the debut of Webb’s showcase, which was built for the US space agency by aerospace giant Northrop Grumman Corp.

Between them are two nebulae –– enormous clouds of gas and dust blasted into space by stellar explosions that form new stellar nurseries –– and two sets of galaxy clusters.

One of them, according to NASA, features an object in the foreground that is so massive that it acts as a “gravity lens,” a visual distortion of space that greatly magnifies light coming from behind it to expose fainter objects further and further into the past. . How far back and what appears on camera remains to be seen.

NASA will also publish Webb’s first spectrographic analysis of an exoplanet, revealing molecular signs of the pattern of light filtered through its atmosphere. The exoplanet in this case, about half the mass of Jupiter, is more than 1,100 light-years away. A light year is the distance light travels in a year –– 9.5 trillion km.

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‘Moves me as a scientist’

The five targets of Webb’s introduction were previously known to scientists. One of these, a group of galaxies 290 million light-years from Earth known as Stephan’s Quintet, was first discovered in 1877.

But NASA officials promise Webb’s imagery captures the subject in a whole new light, literally.

“What I saw moved me as a scientist, as an engineer and as a human being,” NASA deputy administrator Pam Melroy, who has reviewed the images, told reporters at a June 29 news briefing.

Klaus Pontoppidan, a Webb project scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, where mission control engineers operate the telescope, has promised that the first images will “give astronomers and the public the long-awaited ‘wow’.”

The $9 billion infrared telescope, the largest and most complex astronomical observatory ever sent into space, was launched on Christmas Day from French Guiana, on the northeast coast of South America.

A month later, the 6,350 kg instrument reaches its gravitational parking spot in solar orbit, circling the Sun together with Earth nearly 1.6 million km from home.

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Source: Reuters

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