It is the biggest and most powerful telescope ever launched to space. James Webb, which is the successor to the iconic three-decade-old Hubble telescope, has an ambitious mission to study the early universe, work out how fast it is now expanding and analyse objects throughout the cosmos ranging from galaxies to exoplanets.
The telescope's first job was to focus on the sun-like star HD 84406, in the constellation Ursa Major, which includes the star pattern the Big Dipper that is located about 260 light-years away. We were so happy to see that light makes its way into NIRCam,' said Marcia Rieke, principal investigator for the NIRCam instrument and regents professor of astronomy, University of Arizona. 'The entire Webb team is ecstatic at how well the first steps of taking images and aligning the telescope are proceeding. Instead, the space agency said the images would be blurry and repetitive because they have been taken as part of the telescope's fine-tuning process. NASA had earlier cautioned that the images would not resemble the stunning photos of the cosmos taken by similar space telescopes. Over the next month or so, a team of scientists will gradually adjust the mirror segments until the 18 images become a single star. What looks like a simple image of blurry starlight now becomes the foundation to align and focus the telescope in order for Webb to deliver unprecedented views of the universe this summer, NASA said. The result is an image mosaic of 18 randomly organised dots of starlight, the product of Webb's unaligned mirror segments all reflecting light from the same star back at its secondary mirror and into the telescope's main camera, called the Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam). It had been expected to take its first starry images in May, for release to the public in June, but the US space agency revealed plans to share preliminary snaps today instead. The $10 billion (£7.4 billion) observatory settled into its orbit one million miles from our planet last month, and is gearing up to look back in time towards the dawn of the universe. NASA has unveiled the first ever images from its James Webb Space Telescope, including a 'selfie' of its primary mirror.
0 kommentar(er)
