Octavia Feliciano
Staff Writer
After traveling 1 million miles from Earth, the James Webb Telescope has sent back its first set of images from space: 18 pictures of a star in the Ursa Major constellation. The images are a crucial first step in aligning the telescope’s mirrors to capture images of deep space, The New York Times reports.
Lee Feinberg, who has been part of the James Webb Telescope Program for 20 years and is currently the instrument’s Optical Telescope Element Manager, spoke with NPR about the event.
“This amazing telescope has not only spread its wings, but it has now opened its eyes. It is still early, but we are very encouraged with what we are seeing,” Feinberg said.
The star in Ursa Major is being used as a reference point. Each of the 18 images of the star correspond with one of 18 mirrored segments the telescope uses to capture pictures of space. Astronomers at NASA are now adjusting these mirrored segments based on the captured images, and will continue to do so until they produce one unified image of the star, the New York Times reports. Once these mirrors are calibrated, the James Webb Telescope can accomplish the tasks it was designed for: gathering information on a multitude of subjects, ranging from black holes to the Big Bang to potentially habitable planets in the orbit of nearby stars.
BBC reports that NASA views the James Webb Telescope as a successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, which has been in operation for 30 years and is starting to show signs of wear. NASA’s goals for the telescope are to “complement and extend the discoveries of the Hubble Space Telescope, with longer wavelength coverage and greatly improved sensitivity,” according to their website.
“Launching Webb to space was of course an exciting event, but for scientists and optical engineers, this is a pinnacle moment, when light from a star is successfully making its way through the system down onto a detector,” said Michael McElwain, the James Webb Space Telescope's observatory scientist, in a statement on NASA’s blog.
NASA launched the James Webb Telescope on Dec. 25, 2021. They expect the telescope’s first scientific images of deep space to arrive this summer.
Visitors to NASA’s website have the opportunity to track the telescope’s location in space in real time, as well as the opportunity to keep up with the mirror alignment process.
The James Webb Telescope was named after the second administrator of NASA, James E. Webb. Webb served as administrator from Feb. 14, 1961 to Oct. 7, 1968, and it was under his leadership that much of the development of Project Apollo, the mission that would land men on the moon, was completed.
