The telescope is ready to show us what it has been looking at. The White House will give a brief glimpse of the slide show on Monday.
President Biden is going to release a picture of the observatory. The biggest promise of the telescope is to look at the first stars that formed after the Bigbang. Monday's snapshot is a proof of principle of the technique and a hint at what more is to come from scientific instruments that have waited decades to be online.
President Biden will reveal the first image on Monday at 5 p.m. on NASA TV or on the agency's website. A live video feed will be provided by the New York Times.
NASA released a list of subjects that it had recorded. One of them will be shown off by Mr. Biden at the White House.
The image is called SMACS-0723. It is a patch of sky that can be seen from the southern hemisphere and is often visited by Hubble and other telescopes. Astronomers use a kind of telescope called a Cosmic Telescope, which is four billion light-years away, to look at the universe. The light from the galaxies behind the cluster is warped and magnified by the cluster's gravitation field.
NASA's associate administrator for space science described the image as the deepest view yet into the past of our universe. He said later images will look back even further.
Other pictures will be shown at 10:30 a.m. by NASA. You can watch a live video stream on NASA TV or on the internet. They will be shown off at the space flight center.
The pictures depict a tour of the universe painted in colors that no human eye can see. The images were selected by a small team of experts to show off the capabilities of the new telescope. Old friends to astronomy both amateur and professional are now able to see the images in newIR.
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 is a group of galaxies that are close to each other in the constellation Pegasus.
A detailed spectrum of WASP-96b, a gas giant half the mass of Jupiter, will be released by the team. It is possible to see what is in that world's atmosphere.
Getting to space on Christmas Day last year was just the beginning of the project.
The second L2 is about a million miles away from Earth. The Earth and the sun pull on each other at L2.
The 18 hexagonal pieces of the mirror and the sun shield had to be unfolded before it could be used.
The deployment was nerve-racking for the people watching on Earth. If any of the actions had not worked, the telescope would have been useless. They all did a good job.
Four scientific instruments had to be turned on as well. The 18 mirrors were aligned in the months after the telescope arrived. Scientists were able to begin a final series of checks on the Mid-Infrared instrument after it was cooled to minus 447 degrees. The science could start once these and other steps were completed.
The primary mirror of the telescope is 6.5 meters in diameter, which is seven times the diameter of Hubble, giving it the ability to see further into the past.
There are cameras and other instruments that are sensitive to the heat radiation of the sun. The expansion of the universe causes the light that is visible to be shifted to the longer wavelength that is invisible to humans.
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