All four science instruments on NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope have achieved “perfect alignment” ahead of their official debut this summer, project officials said in a news conference Monday (May 9).
“I am pleased to report that the telescope alignment was completed with better performance than we expected,” said Michael McElwain, James Webb Space Telescope said a project scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland CBS News. “We basically came up with a perfect telescope alignment. There is no modification to the telescope’s optics that would significantly improve our scientific performance.”
To illustrate the telescope’s readiness, NASA shared a teaser image taken by Webb’s Mid-Infrared Instrument, or MIRI. The new image shows a direct comparison of observations of a nearby galaxy taken by Webb with observations of the same galaxy previously taken by NASA’s now-defunct Spitzer Space Telescope.
Related: In a historic launch, the Webb telescope shot into space
While the Spitzer image shows a nebula of about seven nearby stars located in the Large Magellanic Cloud (an orbiting satellite galaxy). Milky Way) Webb’s image of the same region captures the foreground stars in fine detail, offset by soft interstellar clouds Gas And hundreds of stars and background galaxies captured NASA is calling Unprecedented details.
Consistent with its instruments, NASA said the Webb telescope is awaiting a final instrument calibration before officially beginning its study of distant stars later this summer. In July, the telescope will release its first series of science images targeting galaxies and objects that “highlight all web science topics… from the start.” being“Klaus Pontopedan, a web project scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore,” said Klaus Pontopedan, a web project scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore.
NASA launched the $10 billion Webb Telescope on December 25, 2021, sending the telescope on a 1.5 million kilometer journey to its final location in the sky. The telescope consists of 18 hexagonal mirror segments joined together to form a large mirror 6.4 m wide. The design allowed the telescope’s mirror system to fold into a rocket during launch—unlike Webb’s predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope, which had just been manufactured 1 Basic mirror It’s about 2.4 meters wide, as Live Science previously reported.
Scientists expect Webb to be able to photograph objects that are far away 100 times too dark Seen from the Hubble Space Telescope. The telescope was designed to observe the faint light from the oldest stars in the universe, which are around 13.8 billion years old – just millions of years later the big explosion.
Originally published on Live Science.
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