US President Joe Biden on Monday will release one of the first images taken by the James Webb Space Telescope, the most powerful observatory ever sent into orbit and a step forward in unraveling the mysteries of the distant universe.
The unveiling will take place at 17:00 (2100 GMT) during a livestream event at the White House, official statements said, leaving the space community in a state of great anticipation.
NASA revealed last week that Webb’s first targets included distant galaxies, bright nebulae and a distant giant gaseous planet.
The very first image to be released by the US president will be of the “deep field” — an image taken with a very long exposure to detect the faintest objects in the distance — according to a person familiar with the matter.
NASA previously said Webb would achieve this image by pointing its primary imager at massive foreground galaxy clusters called SMACS 0723, which draw light from objects far behind them toward the observer, an effect dubbed “gravitational lensing.” .
This promises to be what NASA chief Bill Nelson called last month the “deepest picture of our universe ever taken.”
The rest of the first wave of images is scheduled to be released by NASA on Tuesday.
Webb’s infrared capabilities make it uniquely powerful, allowing it 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, a Space Telescope Science Institute (STSI) astronomer and 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-high cosmic pinnacle captured in an iconic image by the Hubble Space Telescope, humanity’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.”
– 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.
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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