On Friday, the scientists behind NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope published some of the observatory’s first photographs (Feb. 11). The main image, which displays a star named HD 84406 and is simply a fraction of a mosaic captured over 25 hours beginning on Feb. 2 during the ongoing effort to align the observatory’s segmented mirror, doesn’t even hint at the power Webb will bring to the universe once it’s fully operational.
The image is a little fuzzy, but it’s an excellent starting point in the long process of fine-tuning JWST’s mirrors to snap ultra-sharp photos of the distant Universe. The image’s 18 spots of light all show the same lonely star, known as HD 84406, as seen through a separate primary mirror section. Light gathered from each main mirror segment was reflected back to Webb’s secondary mirror and measured with the Near Infrared Camera, or NIR Cam, one of the telescope’s key imaging sensors. This sensor will be utilized to detect and fix optical imperfections during the telescope’s alignment procedure.
James Webb Space Telescope:
Images captured from the telescope:
“The entire Webb team is ecstatic with how nicely the first steps of taking photographs and aligning the telescope are proceeding,” said Marcia Rieke, principle investigator of the equipment on which Webb relies for the alignment procedure and an astronomer at the University of Arizona, in a NASA release.
According to NASA, the process of collecting the light utilized to make the visual mosaic took roughly 25 hours. The 18 photos of HD 84406 were assembled from almost 1,500 photographs acquired when Webb was oriented to various positions around the star’s estimated location. Following the several adjustments that the telescope will make over the next few months, the mirror will begin to align appropriately. When all of the mirror segments are aligned to form a smooth surface, those 18 stars will merge into one.
JWST is presently 48 days away from its Christmas Day debut and is in the midst of a six-month commissioning phase. The telescope spent the first month of its life unfolding from its launch configuration and travelling about one million miles (1.5 million kilometres) away from Earth.
The majority of the remaining time is spent awakening and calibrating the observatory’s instruments, as well as making minute adjustments to the telescope’s 18 golden mirror segments, which are required for crisp, clear photographs of the deep universe.
NASA anticipates that the first set of clear photos for scientific examination will be available this summer. But, for the time being, the JWST team is ecstatic about the results of the telescope’s initial imaging and alignment procedures, which put it one step closer to taking incredible photographs.
“Of course, launching Webb into orbit was a wonderful event, but for scientists and optical engineers, this is a pinnacle moment, when light from a star successfully makes its way through the system down onto a detector,” JWST project scientist Michael McElwain wrote in a blog post.
