NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said Wednesday the agency will unveil the “deepest picture of our Universe ever taken” on July 12, thanks to the newly commissioned James Webb Space Telescope.
“If you think about it, this is further than mankind has ever looked before,” Nelson said during a news conference at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, the operations center for the $10 billion observatory that launched last December It was and is now orbiting the sun one million miles (1.5 million kilometers) from Earth.
A marvel of engineering, Webb can see further into the cosmos than any telescope before it, thanks to its huge primary mirror and infrared-focused instruments that allow it to see through dust and gas.
“It will study objects in the solar system and atmospheres of exoplanets orbiting other stars and give us clues as to whether their atmospheres may resemble our own,” added Nelson, who spoke by phone while isolating with Covid.
“It might answer some of the questions we have: Where do we come from? What else is out there? Who are we? And of course it will answer some questions we don’t even know what the questions are.”
Webb’s infrared capabilities make it possible to look deeper into the time of the Big Bang, which took place 13.8 billion years ago.
As the universe expands, the light from the earliest stars shifts from the ultraviolet and visible wavelengths where it was emitted to longer infrared wavelengths — which Webb is able to capture with unprecedented resolution.
Currently, the earliest cosmological observations date within 330 million years of the Big Bang, but with Webb’s skills, astronomers believe they will easily break the record.
– 20 years lifetime –
In other good news, NASA Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy revealed that thanks to an efficient launch by NASA partner Arianespace, the telescope could remain in service for 20 years, twice the lifetime it was originally envisioned.
“These 20 years will not only allow us to delve deeper into history and time, but we will also delve deeper into science because we have the opportunity to learn, grow and make new observations,” she said .
NASA also intends to share Webb’s first-ever spectroscopy of a distant planet known as an exoplanet on July 12, NASA’s top scientist Thomas Zurbuchen said.
Spectroscopy is a tool for analyzing the chemical and molecular composition of distant objects, and a planetary spectrum can help characterize its atmosphere and other properties, e.g. B. if there is water and what its soil is like.
“We’re going to be looking at those worlds out there right from the start that keep us up at night looking up at the stars and wondering, if we look out there, is there life somewhere else?” Zurbuchen said.
Nestor Espinoza, an STSI astronomer, told AFP that previous exoplanet spectroscopies done with existing instruments were very limited compared to what Webb was able to do.
“It’s like being in a very dark room where you can only see through a small pinhole,” he said of current technology. Now, with Webb, “You’ve got a huge window open, you can see all the little details.”
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