Space enthusiasts hold their breath: The James Webb Space Telescope, the most powerful ever to orbit, will reveal stunning new images of the universe on Tuesday, with clarity never seen before.
Distant galaxies, bright nebulae and a distant gas giant planet are among the observatory’s targets, NASA said Friday.
The images were jealously guarded to give suspense at the moment of the great revelation.
“I look forward to not having to keep these secrets any longer, that will be a great relief,” Klaus Pontoppidan, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STSI) who oversees the telescope, told AFP.
NASA chief Bil Nelson promised “the deepest picture ever taken of our universe.”
The infrared capabilities of the James Webb telescope make it powerfully unique, allowing it to simultaneously pierce cosmic dust clouds and detect light from the earliest stars, which has expanded into infrared wavelengths as the universe has done.
This factor allows it to see further into the past than any other telescope, to a period close to and after the Big Bang, 13.8 billion years ago.
“When I first saw the images… I suddenly learned three things about the universe that I didn’t know before,” Dan Coe, an astronomer at STSI and an expert on the early universe, told AFP. “I was completely blown away.”
An international committee decided that the first wave of images would include the Carina Nebula, a huge cloud formation of dust and gas 7,600 light-years away.
The Carina Nebula is famous for its towering pillars that include “Mystic Mountain,” a three-light-year-tall pinnacle captured in an iconic image by the Hubble Space Telescope, humanity’s first space observatory.
Webb has also performed spectroscopy – light analysis that reveals detailed information – on a gas giant planet called WASP-96 b, discovered in 2014.
About 1,150 light-years from Earth, WASP-96 b is about half the mass of Jupiter and orbits its star in just 3.4 days.
Nestor Espinoza, an astronomer at STSI, told AFP that the last exoplanet to undergo spectroscopy with the instruments available at the time had a very limited range compared to what Webb can do.
“It’s like having a very dark room and only having a little pinhole to see into it,” he said of earlier technology. Now, with the Webb, “it’s like opening a huge window; you can see all the little details.”
Launched in December 2021 from French Guiana on an Ariane 5 rocket, the James Webb Telescope orbits the Sun at a distance of 1.6 million kilometers from Earth, in a region of space known as the second Lagrange point.
There, it remains in a fixed position in relation to the Earth and the Sun, with a minimum fuel requirement, enough to supply course corrections.
Considered an engineering marvel, the total cost of the project is estimated at $10 billion, making it the most expensive scientific platform ever built, rivaled only by the European Organization for Nuclear Research’s Large Hadron Collider ( CERN).
The Webb’s main mirror is over 6.5 meters wide and is made up of 18 gold-plated segments. The frame provides the same stability a handheld camera would need to take the best photos.
Charlie Atkinson, chief program engineer for prime contractor Northrop Grumman’s James Webb Space Telescope, told AFP it wobbles no more than 17 millionths of a millimetre.
Atkinson, who has worked on the show since 1998, said, “We knew this was going to take some of the best talent in the world, but it was doable.”
After the first images, astronomers from around the world will share time at the telescope and undertake projects that will compete to be selected by anonymous juries to minimize any bias.
Thanks to its efficient launch, NASA estimates that Webb’s booster could have a useful life of 20 years, during which time it will work alongside the Hubble and Spitzer telescopes to answer the fundamental questions of the cosmos.
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