The $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope, launched in late 2021, was hyped as the most revolutionary space instrument the modern world has ever seen, poised to send back snaps of the universe rivaling its predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope. It looks like JWST is already delivering on that promise—and it has the visuals to prove it.
NASA officials announced on March 16 that JWST reached its goal of aligning its 21-foot, 4-inch hexagon-shaped mirror and Near-Infrared Camera, successfully focusing on a distant star. This alignment is crucial to the telescope being able to collect and focus light cleanly to take pictures of faraway celestial bodies and other strange cosmic phenomena.
The star JWST captured is pretty ordinary with an extraordinarily long name—2MASS J17554042+6551277. But the image itself is exquisite, showing a brilliant reddish flash (enhanced with a filter) with pinpricks of starlight emanating out into the void of space.
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“We have fully aligned and focused the telescope on a star, and the performance is beating specifications. We are excited about what this means for science,” Ritva Keski-Kuha, deputy optical telescope element manager for JWST at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, said in a press release. “We now know we have built the right telescope.”
JWST is the first space telescope and observatory of its kind to use such a massive mirror—itself comprising 18 smaller hexagonal mirrors. Each of them needs to be positioned precisely within nanometers to ensure the telescope collects enough light to allow its scientific instruments to work correctly. Fine-tuning the mirror segments takes many months requires several blurry and ugly testing images before the telescope is perfectly aligned. (Though judging from how evocative this latest image is, the process will be well worth it.)
Over the next six weeks, NASA said it would work on aligning the telescope’s other instruments. These include the Near-Infrared Spectrograph (used to analyze an object’s physical properties like temperature, mass, and chemical composition), Mid-Infrared Instrument (to help the telescope see things like distant galaxies newly formed stars), and a Fine Guidance Sensor (to help it pinpoint precisely so it can take high-quality images).
JWST is about a million miles away from Earth and is scheduled to be fully operational by early May. The telescope’s first scientific observations will hopefully tell us more about the 19 galaxies near our Milky Way and how the cosmos was born. Although maybe most of us are just looking forward to epic shots of colorful nebulas, mysterious planets, and ominous black holes.
