On Tuesday morning, NASA will show off the first images from the new telescope. It will take 30 years and $10 billion of planning, building, testing and innovation to end.
The pictures are painted in colors that are invisible to the human eye. The atmosphere blocks the rays from reaching the ground. They can penetrate the clouds of dust that cover the nurseries where stars are born and turn them into transparent bubbles that show the baby stars.
The pictures will be shown by NASA. There is a live video stream. If you sign up here, you'll get a reminder on your digital calendar to see them.
Only a small portion of the world's astronomy community has seen what the Webb has seen. During a news conference in late June, NASA officials gushed over the new images.
Pamela Melroy is NASA's deputy administrator and a former astronauts.
She said that what she saw moved her as a scientist, an engineer and a human being.
As a graduate student, Thomas Zurbuchen realized that he had discovered something about the universe when he looked at the pictures. He said that seeing nature give up its secrets made him emotional.
The administrator of NASA praised the telescope as a good example of what government can do.
The largest space telescope ever launched is called the "Wbb" The mission is to explore the earliest days of the universe, when the universe was just beginning to form after the Big bang. During the past 30 years, NASA has defined astronomy with the Hubble telescope, and it is expected that the new generation of astronomer will follow suit.
Illingworth, an astronomer at the University of California, Santa Cruz, has used Hubble and other telescopes to look for distant primeval galaxies.
Bill Ochs, the telescope's project manager, said that the telescope was the result of 20,000 people working together. A semi-stable resting spot has been created by the combination of the Earth and the sun at a location called L2 a million miles from Earth. If you could see it from here, you'd see that the mirror is made of 18 gold-coated beryllium hexagons and that it has a sunscreen that keeps the telescope cold.
The pictures to be revealed on Tuesday were cherry-picked by a small team of astronomy and science outreach experts to show off the capabilities of the new telescope. They will be shown off at the space flight center. The release of the images will be followed by a scientific seminar and a rush of professional astronomer to their computers to take and analyze their own data from scientific observations that began in June.
There are five subjects of the pictures. Old friends of both amateur and professional astronomer now get to see them in new areas.
The Southern Ring Nebula is a shell of gas ejected from a dying star about 2,000 light-years from here and the Carina Nebula is a huge expanse of gas and stars.
Stephan's Quintet, a tight cluster of galaxies, two of which are in the process of merging, is one of many familiar astronomy scenes.
A detailed spectrum of WASP-96b, a gas giant half the mass of Jupiter, will be released by the team. It is too hot and big to have a life, but a spectrum of detail could show what is going on in that world.
There is finally a swath of southern sky called SMACS. It is a field that is often visited by Hubble and other telescopes, and it has a massive cluster of galaxies that can be seen from further back in time.
According to Dr. Zurbuchen, this image was the deepest view into the past of our universe, showing the emergence of the universe almost 14 billion years ago. He said that later images would show even more.
It is difficult to not break records with this telescope.
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