You’re not going to believe the kinds of quality images that the new James Webb Space Telescope is
capable of delivering to our excitable eyes! We’re talking about some shiny new HD images of space,
the likes of which we’ve never seen before as the NASA team responsible have finally completed the
alignment of the technological marvel, in a huge milestone for NASA and humanity! Let’s look at
how the James Webb Space Telescope’s Alignment has been Completed and see some New Images!
History The James Webb
Space Telescope might seem like something that you just started to hear about, but in fact,
work began on the project over thirty years ago at the Space Telescope Science Institute, or STScI,
with a challenge from the Director of the institute, Riccardo Giacconi asking them to
‘think about the next major mission beyond [The Hubble Space Telescope].’
Towards the end of 1989, a workshop held at STScI before the launch of Hubble led to this
development. The goal was simply, ‘what next?’ In 1993, the Space Telescope Institute Council,
or STIC, created a committee that would study concepts of twenty-first century
astronomy missions and in 95, the committee recommended building a 4-m telescope. However,
the NASA Administrator Dan Goldin insisted that 4-m was too modest, and that an 8-m
telescope would be much more suitable. The project was named after NASA’s second
administrator, James E. Webb, who led the agency during the Apollo program
and established scientific research as one of the most vital NASA activities. Development and
replanning continued until 2007, when nine of the ten technology development items for the project
successfully passed a Non-Advocate Review, i.e. the technologies were considered mature
enough that risk would be suitably mitigated, and so construction began.
It has taken that long, with the critical design review phase taking over eleven years alone,
and the project has cost a total of about nine point seven billion dollars, the lion’s
share of which was spent on spacecraft design and development, with the rest going on plans
to support five years of mission operations. Finally, after a lot of consideration, careful
planning and construction, the James Webb Space Telescope was launched on Christmas Day 2021,
and since then alignment has been an undertaking to ensure the perfect photos.
Loadout The James Webb Space Telescope has
an unprecedented level of scientific power thanks to the various instruments that are housed in its
Integrated Science Instrument Module, or ISIM, you got to love those acronyms. The ISIM is situated
behind the primary mirror on the cold side of the scope where it is also protected by the sunshield.
The size of the primary mirror, coupled with the extremely high sensitivity of the four
incredibly precise scientific instruments is what makes the James Webb Space Telescope
capable of so much! Within the ISIM, there is a Mid-Infrared Instrument or MIRI,
a Near-Infrared Camera or NIRCam, a Near-Infrared Spectrograph or NIRSpec and a Near-Infrared
Imager and Slitless Spectrograph – slash - Fine Guidance Sensor, or NIRISS/FGS.
This gives the telescope an extremely high capability and several modes of operation,
all so that it can conduct its operations to the best quality that we can generate on Earth,
except not on Earth, in halo orbit, circling around a point in space known as the Sun-Earth
L2 Lagrange point, about one and a half million kilometres or nine hundred thirty thousand miles
outside Earth’s solar orbit. It’s about three thousand times further away from us here on
Earth than Hubble is. Of course, this is great as an achievement, and greatly extends our ability to
view deep space. However, it also means that Webb is out of our reach, and were something to break,
we’d have no way to fix it. The Perfect Photos
Alignment is now completed on the project, as the James Webb Space Telescope finished
its alignment phase, proving that it can absolutely capture “crisp, well-focused
images” with all four of its science instruments. Now, images of a very “boring” star have been
sending shockwaves through the world of astronomy, as they are the first that have been sent back
from Webb, and they have dramatically exceeded the hopes and expectations of the scientific
community, including the team responsible for it. Now that the telescope has completed the
self-assembly of the eighteen segments that make up its main mirror, it’s been able to take
exceptionally clear images of a completely regular star, just as a test of its own capabilities.
The star in question you ask? Its name is HD84406, which is not a very interesting name.
What is interesting is that the star is actually a hundred times fainter than what you can see
through your human eyes. But even that is not what has the scientific community is
the number of little dots that are observable in the back of the photo. Each one is another
galaxy, and we’ve never seen them before! Lee Feinberg, Webb’s optical telescope element
manager at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Centre said, “we said last fall that we would know that
the telescope is working properly when we have an image of a star that looks like a star. Now you’re
seeing that image, and I’m happy to say that the optical performance of the telescope is absolutely
phenomenal. It is really working extremely well. The performance is as good if not better than
out most optimistic prediction.” Webb’s Capabilities
It’s clear that the telescope is operating wonderfully, but as yet the images captured
are still just a test. Jane Rigby, Webb’s operations project scientist at Goddard, said,
“The telescope’s performance so far is everything that we dared to hope. The engineering images
that we saw today are as sharp and as crisp as the images that Hubble can take but are at a
wavelength of light that is totally invisible to Hubble. So this is making the invisible
universe snapping into very, very sharp focus.” She continues, “There’s no way that Webb can look
for two thousand sensitive at any point in the sky, and not get an incredibly deep field. This
is going to be the future from now on. Wherever we look, it’s a deep field. Without really breaking a
sweat, we’re seeing back in time to galaxies that we’re seeing the light as it looked billions of
years ago.” But of course, Webb hasn’t even begun to flex yet. At present, the only instrument that
is actually functional is the NIRCam, and it is this camera that delivered the first images.
The other instruments, the MIRI, NIRSpec and NIRISS/FGS will begin to function in
the next couple of months and will allow us to look literally back in time and capture
the early days of our universe, just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang.
What Does This Mean? If you’re following,
then you probably already know that everything we know about the age of the universe,
the creation of the universe and the expansion of the universe, we have ascertained through various
scientific methods, including astronomy, but this ability to see back through time at light
that has long since vanished from whence it came, will potentially change everything.
We could learn so much more about how galaxies are formed and how evolution occurs in them.
Dr Rebecca Allen, from the Swinburne University of Technology’s Space Technology and Industry
Institute says, “The James Webb Space Telescope is going to shed light on the universe in a few
different ways. It will be able to capture the distant starlight from galaxies that has been
redshifted from UV wavelengths to the infrared – meaning we can literally see further back
when the universe was younger to understand more about how the first galaxies formed and grew.”
However, there’s a lot more to it than just looking really, really,
REALLY far away. Allen says that “The telescope’s infrared instruments are
also perfectly suited to helping us reveal more about the nearby universe by studying planets
outside our solar system. I’m very excited to see the telescope take spectroscopy of distant worlds
as they pass in front of their stars and hopefully confirm the existence of water beyond Earth.”
She continues, “Both near and far where planets and stars are formed there’s heaps of dust.
Because over time stars enrich the universe as they create heavier elements in their cores.
Dust is annoying because it loves to absorb the bright light coming from stars, shrouding our
view of these important regions and even making distant galaxies harder to see. But this light is
re-emitted at longer wavelengths that JWST will be able to see, allowing us to learn more about how
planetary systems like our own were formed. Imagine what the James Webb Space Telescope
can accomplish in its lifetime? We could learn about life on other planets or find
other proxy Earths that might be out there. Elon Musk must be salivating at the news,
because this telescope is going to make it possible for the human race to find out infinitely
more than we currently know about the inky black void that’s outside our own tiny little planet.
What do you think about the James Webb Space Telescope? And what puzzles of space do you
expect the Webb Telescope to reveal? While heading to the comment section, take a detour to hit that
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