James Webb Space Telescope was spotted.
While both were working in deep space, a star-charting craft spotted the James Webb Space Telescope.
The European Space Agency has a mission that goes around Earth-sun L2 which is a point between the sun and Earth that is roughly 1.5 million miles away. On the first try, Gaia was able to spot the newcomer and take a picture of it.
The agency officials wrote in a statement published Wednesday (March 16) that the tiny speck of light in the two telescopes is from very little reflected sunlight.
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After the long journey out to L2 and the realization that the spacecraft should be just within the star-charting craft, the opportunity arose.
Gaia is not designed to take pictures of objects in the sky. One of the instruments on board takes sky images. The sky mapper is the finder scope of Gaia.
Every six hours, the sky mapper captures a strip around the entire sphere. The entire sky can be imaged over time as the image is slightly tilted to the last strip. These slices are used to look for star images to help with scientific mapping.
The computer can be manually requested to keep a stretch of the image data. The sky mapper was originally intended for technical purposes, but has found some scientific uses. Why not use it for a picture of him?
The first opportunity came on Feb. 18 when the spacecraft were 620,000 miles apart. After the opportunity passed, Mignard sent a happy email to the team. Juanma Martin-Fleitas, the Gaia calibration engineer, identified the subject line as "JWST: Got it!!" a few days later.
The team expects to release images later Wednesday showcasing the latest stage in the mirror alignment process, as they work through the commissioning stages to get ready for studying the deep universe. Around June, the commission is set to finish.
The public is expected to get another set of data from the Gaia team in 2022.
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