Mark Megahan
It’s not even open for business yet but the James Webb Space Telescope is already impressing NASA engineers. On Wednesday, March 16, the team released the first focused image ever taken by the funky new mirror using all of it’s gold plated segments at once. They say it worked a whole lot better than they ever expected. Those little spots in the background are detailed HD images of never before seen galaxies.
James Webb takes first shot
Everybody knows that engineers who design aerospace equipment are all nerds at heart. The designers of the James Webb Telescope must have been fans of the SciFi cult classic “Dark Star.”
The way the mirror sits on it’s platform is just too much of a coincidence not to have been intentional. All that matters is whether the design works and boy, does it.
James Webb, or at least the telescope bearing his name, has “gazed into the distant universe and shown perfect vision.”
Meant only as a calibration test of all the mirror segments, the camera captured “a spiky image of a faraway star photobombed by thousands of ancient galaxies.” No applause, designers say, just throw cash.
They slap big disclaimers on the Webb telescope image as a “test shot” not “an official science observation.” It was only meant “to see how its 18 hexagonal mirrors worked together for a single coordinated image taken 1 million miles away from Earth.”
They worked together flawlessly. Last month they looked at a much closer star with each of the 18 segments one-by-one.
Scientists ‘giddy’
NASA scientists are acting like there’s nitrous oxide in the ventilation system. They were “giddy as they watched the latest test photos arrive.” They pointed the full Webb Telescope mirror at a faint little star 2,000 light-years away, 2MASS J17554042+6551277 to be exact.
They note the red and spiky look to the image is due to “filters.” What amazed everyone are the images in the background.
“You can’t help but see those thousands of galaxies behind it, really gorgeous,” beams Webb operations project scientist Jane Rigby.
They’re “several billions of years old.” The team hopes to use the new equipment to look a long way back in time to only “a couple hundred million years after the Big Bang.”
Webb is the replacement for Hubble. Now 32-years-old, Hubble needed a pair of glasses when it first got deployed. The mirror warped from the harsh temperature fluctuations in space.
The first official science images are expected to come out in late June or so.
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