NASA’s first images of its new space telescope demonstrate how it is coming into focus.
Although the James Webb Space Telescope, the new and powerful instrument that captured the first starlight has achieved a significant milestone for the $10 million space observatory, it is not yet sending back the breathtaking views of the cosmos that astronomers are hoping to reveal this summer.
The telescope’s 18 hexagonal, gold-coated mirror segments don’t align perfectly yet and act as separate telescopes.
Mirror segments capture different views of a single bright star when astronomers point their observatory at it. The images become blurred and out of focus. Each dot represents a different view from the same star and is marked with the name of its mirror segment. Mission managers adjust each mirror segment’s position to make them work together as one large mirror measuring 21 feet in diameter.
“This incredible telescope has not only expanded its wings, it has also opened its eyes,” Lee Feinberg, Webb’s optical telescope element manager at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. He adds that all initial results are in line with their expectations and simulations. It is still early but we are encouraged by what we see. “There is no indication of any major flaws, such as the one that plagued the Hubble Space Telescope before the astronauts fixed it. Feinberg warns that there is still much to be done. Feinberg believes they will not be able to know everything is okay until March’s fine-tuning.
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Early in the morning of February 2, the first light entered the telescope’s main camera, a near-infrared camera called NIRCam. To cheer and watch, scientists gathered at Baltimore’s Space Telescope Science Institute to cheer.
Marcia Rieke, principal investigator at NIRCam, and regents’ professor of astronomy, has said that the excitement of finally getting light through the telescope onto NIRCam detectors was hard to describe. She has dedicated more than 20 years of her adult life to this endeavor. This place was a huge celebration because the light had made its way and we were super happy.
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The first images were simply an engineering check to ensure that there was nothing blocking the light path into the detector. Rieke says, “We got beautiful images. At least beautiful to someone who has worked on NIRCam long enough.”
Feinberg says, “After all the years, to actually view data when we’re in zero gravity, or in space, is it emotional?” People were excited to see the data in the room. We are still cautious, however, because there are still things we need to do.
Feinberg recalls, however, that his wife, who was home just a few days after seeing the initial images, said that it was the first time they had ever seen him smile since December. He says, “We all feel energized by this.”
James Webb Space Telescope launched on Christmas Day. It has been in development for decades, but was so far over budget and delayed that Congress attempted to end it. It is so large that it had to fold up in order to fit into a rocket. The telescope then unfurled itself in space. The observatory, which is three stories tall, is now in an orbit around the sun. This keeps it approximately a million miles from Earth.
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This telescope will be fully operational once it is completed. It should be capable of capturing faint infrared radiation that has traveled through space for nearly the entire universe’s history. It will reveal what the first galaxies looked after the Big Bang. Astronomers will be able to examine the atmospheres of other planets orbiting stars and search for gas combinations that could indicate the existence of life.
Marshall Perrin (Webb deputy telescope scientist at Space Telescope Science Institute) says that mirrors that depict a single star were quite close in images taken using the camera. This suggests that they are aligned fairly well.
Perrin says, “It’s a testament to the care and precision with which this observatory was assembled on the ground and how smoothly it went to space and all those deployments.” We are now in a good place to align these mirrors so they can act together.