NASA is preparing to show what the James Webb Space Telescope can do when the space agency releases the first color images of the observatory before it begins its scientific operations that reveal the secrets of the universe.
Nana Christmas morning kick offThe telescope’s 6.5-meter mirror opened and a sunblock the size of a tennis court opened into space. The telescope is now centered around it A million miles from Earth Once commissioned, it is ready to begin decades of scientific observations.
NASA, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency plan to release the first color images and spectroscopic data from the James Webb Space Telescope on Tuesday, July 12 at 10:30 a.m. ET. The announcement will be broadcast live online at NASA.gov and through the agency’s social media platforms.
Take this as a friendly warning that these carefully planned cosmic images will be everywhere on Tuesday.
Webb’s photography team has already shared snippets of Webb’s abilities, suggesting that the upcoming images are something to talk about.
In April, the space agency and its partners launched telescopes The first photo was taken after the “optical telescope” alignment was completed.
The web team chose the star named 2MASS J17554042 + 655127 without scientific reason, NASA web operations scientist Jane Rigby explains. Although the star was a hundred times fainter than the light the human eye could see, it was extremely bright for Webb and a testament to the telescope’s sensitivity.
Then in May, Webb’s science team Picture of the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, used to test the telescope’s medium-infrared instrument, or MIRI. The image below shows the same image taken by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope infrared camera and later captured by the MIRI network.
“Spitzer taught us a lot, but it’s like a whole new world, it’s incredibly beautiful,” Marcia Rickey, principal investigator for the near-infrared webcam said in May.
Ahead of the big reveal, NASA released a list of cosmic targets for Webb’s first images. According to the space agency, the objects were chosen by an international panel that includes representatives from NASA, the European Space Agency, the Canadian Space Agency and the Space Telescope Science Institute.
The first color images from the James Webb Space Telescope include the largest and brightest nebula in the universe, the Carina Nebula, located 7,600 light-years away, and WASP-96 b, an exoplanet located about 1,150 light-years from Earth. The Southern Ring Nebula, an expanding gas cloud around a dying star, will also be shown in the first release of data from JWST. Finally, the Stephan’s Quintet compact galaxy cluster, located in the constellation Pegasus, and the galaxy cluster known as SMACX 0723 will test the deep-field vision capabilities of the observatory.
JWST mission managers say the telescope has enough fuel to last for decades due to its precise launch path. Its predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope, continued to orbit about 300 miles above Earth more than 30 years later. NASA astronauts took several paths in space to fix a defect in the Hubble primary mirror after the initial images returned blurry.
The James Webb Space Telescope is about a million miles from Earth, which means a repair mission is out of the question. Fortunately, the first web images are crystal clear again.
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