The telescope is almost ready to be used. NASA's largest telescope ever built captured a huge image of a neighboring galaxy and beamed it back to Earth as it settled into its new home in deep space.
The $10 billion telescope is expected to begin gathering scientific images in July. In the meantime, the giant new image it sent back for researchers finishing alignment of the Webb's 18 mirrors is much more detailed than previous ones, enough to hold us over for a few more months, hopefully.
The kind of image that it delivers is not until you actually see it.
An astronomer shared an image on social media that compares the latest image from the telescope to the last two images. The image on the far right is not final, but it is already much clearer than its predecessors.
Thank you to @gbrammer for pointing out that the Spitzer SAGE survey took IRAC images of this region! I completely missed this. Check out the evolution of Infrared Space Telescopes! pic.twitter.com/BjrbAgk4ND
— Andras Gaspar 🌻🇺🇦 (@AndrasGaspar) April 29, 2022
NASA is keeping its first scientific target a big secret, but the new masterpieces are almost here.
We thought the space agency could have picked a proposal that included a historical nod to the first image the Hubble Space Telescope captured. NASA has already been comparing older images of the same galaxies against the Webb's performance, and Hubble is generally considered the most direct predecessor.
We will keep our eyes open for that first full.
NASA is running into serious issues with its helicopter.
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