The telescope was launched at 7:21 a.m. on December 25, 2011. The time is 12:14 pm. The Guiana Space Centre, also known as Europe's Spaceport, is on a mission to observe some of the faintest, oldest objects in the universe.
President Joe Biden shared the first full-color image of the universe on July 11. On the next day, NASA released four more images to show off the amazing capabilities of the telescope, including close-ups of a dying star and an alien exoplanet.
The successor to the Hubble Space Telescope will be able to capture spectacular images of the universe. Hubble has revealed the wonders of the universe in unprecedented detail. When it began operation, it was used to study topics like dark energy and exoplanets that were not previously thought of. It has captured the public's imagination and has become a household name.
The European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency are partnering with NASA to operate the James Webb Space Telescope. The telescope is named after a man who oversaw the creation of the Apollo program.
When the "Next Generation Space Telescope" was first applied to, it was in 2002, almost two decades ago. Many scientists argued that he should not have his name on the observatory because of his involvement in discrimination against gay and lesbian NASA employees during his time as an administrator. Space.com reported that NASA decided not to change the mission's name.
According to the Atlantic, the cost of the project was originally thought to be half a billion dollars, but it turned out to be over-optimistic. The cost of building the telescope has doubled since 2009, according to the US Government Accountability Office.
The scientists involved in the project think the results will compensate for the time and money spent on it. NASA wants the public to know that the bigger telescope than Hubble isn't the only difference. While it is both of those things, with more than two and a half times the diameter and a hundred times the sensitivity, at its heart the JWST is a different type of instrument.
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Live Science has previously reported that ordinary optical telescopes can see in the same part of the spectrum as our own eyes. Hubble spanned all of this, as well as a little way into the ultraviolet at shorter wavelength.
According to NASA's website (opens in new tab), the main purpose of the JWST is to be an IR telescope. It will not be able to see green or blue light, just orange and red, and a wide range of longer wavelength beyond that.
The very long wavelength is more useful for astronomy than the visible spectrum is. Our planet's atmosphere blocks much of the light entering Earth-based telescopes, according to the University of StAndrews.
The Earth's heat radiation swampes the fainter astronomy sources. The best place for a telescope to be is out in space, as far away from the Earth as possible.
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The L2 point is where the telescope will be located, following in the footsteps of the Herschel observatory of the European Space Agency.
It will give him a better view of the universe than the one Hubble has, but it will also have a downside. If it breaks down, a repair team won't be able to reach it. One of the reasons why it's taken NASA so long is because everything has to work perfectly on the first attempt.
President Joe Biden revealed JWST's first full-color image on July 11. Named "Webb's first deep field," the image shows a cluster of galaxies called SMACS 0723, located about 4.6 billion light-years from Earth. Astronomers targeted this cluster because of its extraordinary mass; the galaxy cluster is so massive that it bends and magnifies the light of distant galaxies located behind it, allowing us Earthlings to peer deep into the cosmic past.
Through this light-bending process, known as gravitational lensing, SMACS 0723 can be seen magnifying the light of some of the earliest galaxies in the universe, located some 13.5 billion light-years from Earth. Those galaxies appear as warped, swooping arcs of light around the central galaxy cluster. Astronomers have already detected at least two galaxies in this image that are candidates for the oldest galaxy ever observed.
NASA released four more images from the JWST. A spectrum image of a nearby alien exoplanet, which reveals the precise chemical composition of the planet's atmosphere, and several dazzling close-ups of enormous, dust-shrouded objects were included.
There is a bright and gassy region of star formation located approximately 7,600 light-years away from Earth. The new image shows the "cosmic cliffs" of Carina in even more detail than before. There are hundreds of newborn stars in the gassy landscape. Scientists can't identify the strange structures created by the dust in the image.
The image shows a cloud of gas and dust expelled by a star some 2,500 light-years away. A blue haze of ionized gas explodes out of a doomed star at the center of a spectacular image.
It has a cold side and a hot side. The hot side carries the solar panels and an antenna for two-way communication with Earth, while the cold side observes. If the sun and Earth are facing in the same direction, this arrangement will work.
This wouldn't be the case if the telescope was placed in the same location as the Earth, or if it was different from the Earth's position. There is a special distance at which an object can see the Sun and Earth in the same direction. The L2 point is where the telescope will work.
L2 is one of five locations that were studied in the 18th century. There is a third smaller body in a fixed position relative to the first two at these locations. The distance from us to the sun is the same as it is on the Earth. It is four times as far away as the moon in the case of L2
The Ariane 5 rocket is needed to get the telescope all the way to L2 It took just 26 minutes after lift-off from French Guiana for it to be free of Earth's atmosphere. After separation from the rocket, the craft made small adjustments to its trajectory and finally arrived at L2 on January 24.
The Hubble looks very similar to the JWST. The latter is similar to a traditional telescope in that it's enclosed in a tube. Hubble can be exposed to a lot of light depending on where it is in its path.
He is more lucky. All the bright sources are in the same direction and the telescope needs a single large sun shield. The bare mirrors are placed on top of this. It looks like a radio telescope at first glance.
Both Hubble and Webb are built on the same principals. They're both built around a large primary mirror, which has the important job of capturing as much light as possible from objects that may be on the very edge of the observable universe. The larger the mirror, the better.
It is 8 feet in diameter and made from a single piece of glass. The result would be too large and heavy to launch into space if this was scaled up to the size required for the JWST.
The mirror was built from 18 hexagonal segments which were folded up for launch and then deployed into an operational configuration once in space. Although NASA considered making the segments from glass, like Hubble's mirror, they used a very strong, lightweight metal.
The NASA estimates the polishing error to be less than a millionth of an inch. The mirror segments were coated with a thin layer of pure gold to maximize reflectivity.
The main mirror's 21.3-foot diameter is achieved when all the segments are put together. The actual performance improvement is much larger than that, and it's around 2.7 times bigger than Hubble's.
The light-collecting power of a mirror is proportional to its size. The effective area of the mirror is 269 square feet, compared with 43 square feet for Hubble. The improvement is better than a factor of six.
Understanding the story of the universe is related to astronomy.
It is located at the L2 point. It's good for the equipment in the bus, but bad news for the instruments. They need to be kept cold in order to function properly.
The two halves of the spaceship will be separated by a five-layer sun shield. The cold side will be as low as minus 409 F, while the sunlit side will be as high as 100 degrees.
The sun shield was successfully deployed on January 24.
Our eyes and telescopes see visible light, so we usually think of astronomy in that way. From very long wavelength radio waves to very short wavelength X-rays andgamma rays are produced by astronomy. Our eyes evolved to see the wavelength the sun emits most of its energy in, but cooler objects, such as planets and newly formed stars, tend to be seen at longer wavelength.
This is one of the reasons why NASA's Spitzer space telescope, which operated between 2003 and 2020 is so important. There are two reasons for that, the first being that the dust in the universe absorbs visible light. According to NASA, even sun-like stars can be seen in the IR if there is a lot of intervening dust.
NASA began the first tests with the telescope on Feb. 2, with the 18 mirror segments capturing images of stars that would then be used to align the primary mirror, so that the 18 individual images eventually merged to become a single star.
The first objective is the early universe.
It is sometimes referred to as a time machine. Light from distant objects is finite and we see them the same way they were in the past. The JWST will be even more sensitive than Hubble because it will show us more of the past. The first galaxies formed around 13.6 billion years ago.
There is another advantage to using a visible-band telescope.
Light from distant objects increases its wavelength as the universe expands. The light that reaches us in the visible waveband actually reaches us in theIR. One of the first things it will do is conduct a survey of the most distant galaxies in the sky.
Over time is the objective of the second one.
Most people know what a big collection of stars looks like thanks to Hubble. These tend to be close to each other and therefore mature. The glimpse Hubble has given of very early galaxies suggests they are smaller and messier looking.
According to the California Institute of Technology, we don't know how these proto-galaxies formed or how they clumped together to create the larger, regular-looking galaxies we see today. With its ultra-deep view of the early universe, it is hoped that it will be able to answer these questions.
Supermassive black holes are found in the center of most of the galaxies. The black holes that powered the quasars in the early universe were some of the most powerful black holes in the world.
The third objective is the lifecycle of stars.
The galaxies that fill the universe have evolved over time. That isn't true of the stars inside them, which are more like living creatures. The raw material needed to make new stars comes from the remnants of old stars. There is still a mystery surrounding the birth of stars and the planetary discs that may form around them.
Ordinary telescopes can't see baby stars because they're encased in a cocoon of dust. NASA hopes that the dust will reveal the secrets of star formation, because it will be transparent at the IR wavelength used by the telescope. This could teach us about the origins of the sun and solar system.
There are other worlds in the fourth objective.
One of the most exciting areas of modern astronomy is the search for planets outside our solar system that are similar to Earth. The study of the chemical and physical properties of planetary systems will be done with the help of the JWST.
According to NASA's website, its ability to peer through dust and snap high resolution images should allow us to see planetary systems in their earliest stages. The chemical composition of exoplanet atmospheres will be analyzed in order to look for tell-tale signatures of the building blocks of life. The molecule making up planetary atmospheres tend to be most active at these wavelength, so an IR telescope is ideal for this.
We inquired about NASA's hopes for the telescope.
In its first year, what kind of science will the telescope perform?
In the first year, the observing program will encompass everything from the first light in the early universe to the atmospheres of planets outside our solar system. The most interesting objects will be observed with improved resolution, sensitivity and wavelength coverage. The famous objects in the sky will be improved by this. Maybe not all in the first year, but if you can name it, it will be observed.
The JWST might make some exciting discoveries.
The most exciting discoveries are likely to be the ones that we don't know about. We will be able to see space where we were previously blind with the help of the telescope. Astronomers will be able to compare the earliest galaxies to today's grand spirals and ellipticals in order to understand how the universe assembles over billions of years. It will be able to see through the clouds of dust and see the stars and planets that are being born. It will be possible to find the building blocks of life elsewhere in the universe.
Do you think he will be a household name?
I think it will and that people around the globe will be talking about it. Similar to Hubble, the images of the universe will be eye-catching. We expect the images to be seen on the internet, in calendars and on coffee tables.
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