Space enthusiasts hold their breath.
The James Webb Space Telescope, the most powerful ever put into orbit, will reveal stunning new views of the Universe with unprecedented clarity on Tuesday.
Distant galaxies, bright nebulae and a distant giant gas planet are among the observatory’s first targets, US space agency NASA said Friday.
But the images themselves have been jealously guarded to build suspense ahead of the big reveal.
“I’m really looking forward to not having to keep these secrets anymore, it will be a great relief,” Klaus Pontoppidan, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STSI), which Webb oversees, told AFP.
Nasa boss Bill Nelson has promised the “deepest picture of our universe ever taken”.
Webb’s infrared abilities make it uniquely powerful – allowing him to both penetrate clouds of cosmic dust and detect light from the earliest stars, stretched into infrared wavelengths as the universe expanded.
It looks further back in time than any previous telescope, to the time shortly after the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago.
“When I first saw the images … I suddenly learned three things about the universe that I didn’t know before,” Dan Coe, an STSI astronomer and an expert on the early Universe, told AFP. “It totally blew my mind.”
– First goals –
An international committee decided that the first wave of images would include the Carina Nebula, a giant cloud of dust and gas 7,600 light-years away.
The Carina Nebula is famous for its towering pillars, which include “Mystic Mountain,” a three-light-year-tall cosmic pinnacle captured in an iconic image by the Hubble Space Telescope, mankind’s leading space observatory to date.
Webb has also performed spectroscopy — an analysis of light that provides detailed information — on a distant gas giant called WASP-96 b, discovered in 2014.
WASP-96 b is nearly 1,150 light-years from Earth, about half the mass of Jupiter, and orbits its star in just 3.4 days.
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 you’re in a very dark room and you only have a little hole to look through,” he said of the previous technology. Now, with Webb, “You’ve got a huge window open, you can see all the little details.”
Perhaps most enticing, Webb captured an image of foreground galaxy clusters called SMACS 0723 as a sort of cosmic magnifying glass for the extremely distant and faint objects beyond.
– Millions of miles from Earth –
Launched in December 2021 from French Guiana on an Ariane 5 rocket, Webb orbits the Sun one million miles (1.6 million kilometers) from Earth in a region of space known as the second Lagrange point referred to as.
Here it remains in a fixed position relative to the Earth and Sun, using minimal fuel for course corrections.
The total cost of the project is estimated at $10 billion, an engineering marvel, making it one of the most expensive science platforms ever built, comparable to the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.
Webb’s primary mirror is over 6.5 meters wide and consists of 18 gold-coated mirror segments. As with a handheld camera, the structure must remain as stable as possible to get the best shots.
Charlie Atkinson, chief engineer on the James Webb Space Telescope program at prime contractor Northrop Grumman, told AFP that it wobbles no more than 17 millionths of a millimeter.
Atkinson, who has worked on the program since 1998, said, “We knew it would require some of the best talent in the world, but it was doable.”
After the first images, astronomers around the world will be awarded time shares at the telescope, with projects being selected competitively through a process in which applicants and selectors do not know each other’s identities to minimize bias.
Thanks to an efficient launch, Webb has enough propellant to last 20 years, NASA estimates, as it works with the Hubble and Spitzer Space Telescopes to answer fundamental questions about the cosmos.
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