NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said during a news conference on Wednesday that the James Webb Space Telescope will release its first high-resolution color images on July 12.
“If you think about it, it’s farther than humanity has ever moved,” Nelson said. “And we’re just beginning to understand what Webb 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 similar to ours.”
Nelson, who said he tested positive for Covid-19 Tuesday night, was unable to attend the event in person at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore.
The Webb mission, which is estimated to last 10 years, has enough redundant fuel capacity to operate for 20 years, according to NASA Deputy Administrator Pam Milroy.
In the meantime, Webb’s team is finalizing final steps to prepare the observatory and its tools for collecting scientific data, which should be finished next week, said Bill Ochs, NASA’s Webb project manager.
what are you waiting for
Webb started taking his first photos a few weeks ago and is still taking some photos that will be shared on July 12th. This package of color images will be the result of 120 hours of observation – the equivalent of approximately five days. Dice.
Eric Smith, web program scientist and chief scientist in NASA’s Astrophysics Division, said the telescope’s initial purpose was to see the universe’s first stars and galaxies and watch “the universe shine its light for the first time.”
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The exact number and nature of the images have not been shared, said Klaus Pontopedan, Web project scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute, but “each will reveal different aspects of the universe with unprecedented detail and sensitivity.”
The first edition will highlight Webb’s scientific capabilities, as well as the ability of the massive golden mirror and scientific tools to produce stunning 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. We can expect to see the first spectrum of an exoplanet, or how different wavelengths of light and colors reveal properties of other worlds.
The telescope’s near-infrared imager and blunt spectrometer completed preparations this week. The instrument will be able to use a specialized prism to scatter light collected from cosmic sources to create three distinct rainbows that reveal the colors of more than 2,000 infrared colors from a single observation.
This is especially useful when observing exoplanets to determine whether or not they have an atmosphere — and for sorting out the atoms and molecules within them as starlight shines through their atmosphere to determine their composition.
I look forward
The best part, Pontopedan said, is that Webb’s team is still early on in the mission, and the data collected by the space observatory will be released to the public so that scientists around the world can “begin a common journey of exploration.”
The data collected by Webb will allow scientists to make accurate measurements of planets, stars and galaxies in a way that has not been possible before, said Susan Mulally, deputy Webb project scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute.
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“Webb can go back in time after the Big Bang looking for galaxies so far away, it took several billion years to travel from these galaxies to us,” said Jonathan Gardner, deputy chief scientist for NASA’s Project Webb. .
Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, saw some of the first images that will be shared on July 12.
“It’s an exciting time when you see nature suddenly release some of its secrets,” Zurbuchen said Wednesday. “With this telescope, it is very difficult not to break records.”
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