In the months following the telescope’s arrival at L2, its operators painstakingly aligned the 18 mirrors. The telescope’s four scientific instruments also had to be turned on. There were 344 single-point failures, meaning if any of the actions had not worked, the telescope would have ended as useless space junk. At L2, the gravitational pulls of the sun and the Earth keep Webb’s motion around the sun in synchronization with Earth’s.īefore it got there, pieces of the telescope had to be carefully unfolded: the sun shield that keeps the instruments cold so it can precisely capture faint infrared light, the 18 gold-plated hexagonal pieces of the mirror.įor the astronomers, engineers and officials watching on Earth, the deployment was a tense time. The spacecraft has been orbiting the second Lagrange point, or L2, about a million miles from Earth since Jan. Getting to space on Christmas Day last year was just the first step for the James Webb Space Telescope. Why has it taken so long to share Webb’s first images? They will be shown off at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. Eastern time on Tuesday in a live video stream you can watch on NASA TV or YouTube. NASA will show other pictures at 10:30 a.m. Marcia Rieke of the University of Arizona, who led the building of NIRCam, one of the cameras on the Webb telescope that took the picture, said, “This image will not hold the ‘deepest’ record for long but clearly shows the power of this telescope.” What about the rest of the images? Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’s associate administrator for space science, described this image as the deepest view yet into the past of our cosmos. The cluster’s enormous gravitation field acts as a lens, warping and magnifying the light from galaxies behind it that would otherwise be too faint and faraway to see. ![]() It includes a massive cluster of galaxies about four billion light-years away that astronomers use as a kind of cosmic telescope. It is a patch of sky visible from the Southern Hemisphere on Earth and often visited by Hubble and other telescopes in search of the deep past. The image goes by the name of SMACS 0723. Biden showed off one of them at the White House on Monday. On Friday, NASA released a list of five subjects that Webb had recorded with its instruments. What was in the image NASA and Biden showed? When he added that the technology could determine whether other planets were habitable, Mr. ![]() “We are going to be able to answer questions that we don’t even know what the questions are yet,” he said. Nelson, the NASA chief, touted the telescope’s scientific potential at the White House event. The screen gave way to the cosmic image, which was speckled with tiny dots of galaxies and drew applause from the far end of the room. Each sat at small, widely spaced desks in front of a large screen where other NASA officials appeared. Biden and Jane Rigby, an operations project scientist for the Webb telescope. Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris were joined by Alondra Nelson, the acting director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Bill Nelson, the former Florida senator appointed NASA administrator by Mr. ![]() In a setting in the White House’s South Auditorium that evoked scenes from the bridge of a starship on “Star Trek” Mr. Biden, the reveal of the images was also a chance to engage directly with an event that will almost certainly stir wonder and pride among Americans - at a time when his approval ratings have plummeted as voters recoil at high food and gasoline prices and Democrats question his ability to fight for gun control and abortion rights. You can sign up here for a reminder on your personal digital calendar to catch the first glimpse of them.įor Mr. Biden’s announcement served as a teaser for the telescope’s big cosmic slide show coming on Tuesday morning, when scientists reveal what the Webb has been looking at for the past six months.
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