Behold the 1st images from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope!

[LazyHippo]

They aren't the most stunning cosmic photos, but they mark a huge scientific milestone.
The wait is finally over.
The team behind NASA's James Webb Space Telescope released some of the first images from the much-anticipated observatory on Friday (Feb. 11). The main photo, which doesn't even hint at the power Webb will bring to the universe once it's fully operational, shows a star called HD 84406 and is only a portion of the mosaic taken over 25 hours beginning on Feb. 2, during the ongoing process to align the observatory's segmented mirror.

 

"The entire Webb team is ecstatic at how well the first steps of taking images and aligning the telescope are proceeding," Marcia Rieke, principal investigator of the instrument that Webb relies on for the alignment procedure and an astronomer at the University of Arizona, said in a NASA statement.
JWST is now 48 days out from its Christmas Day launch and in the midst of a commissioning process expected to last about six months. The telescope spent the first month unfolding from its launch configuration and trekking out nearly 1 million miles (1.5 million kilometers) away from Earth.

During the bulk of the remaining time, scientists are focusing on waking and calibrating the observatory's instruments and making the minute adjustments to the telescope's 18 golden mirror segments that are necessary for crisp, clear images of the deep universe.

The process is going well, according to NASA.

 

"This initial search covered an area about the size of the full moon because the segment dots could potentially have been that spread out on the sky," Marshall Perrin, the deputy telescope scientist for Webb and an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute, said in the same statement. "Taking so much data right on the first day required all of Webb's science operations and data processing systems here on Earth working smoothly with the observatory in space right from the start. And we found light from all 18 segments very near the center early in that search! This is a great starting point for mirror alignment."

An annotated view of the James Webb Space Telescope's first image marks which mirror segments captured which views of the star HD 84406.

Still, the telescope has a long way to go, as today's image of HD 84406 shows.

 

"The first images are going to be ugly," Jane Rigby, Webb operations project scientist, said during a news conference held on Jan. 8 as the telescope began the process of unstowing its mirrors. "It is going to be blurry. We'll [have] 18 of these little images all over the sky."

And the photograph does indeed show multiple views of HD 84406, the star that JWST scientists recently announced they had chosen to look at first. "Star light, star bright … the first star Webb will see is HD 84406, a sun-like star about 260 light-years away," NASA officials wrote on Twitter on Jan. 28.
HD 84406 is in the constellation Ursa Major, or Big Bear, but is not visible from Earth without a telescope. But it was a perfect early target for Webb because its brightness is steady and the observatory can always spot it, so launch or deployment delays wouldn't affect the plan.
Oddly, JWST won't be able to observe HD 84406 later in its tenure; once the telescope is focused, this star will be too bright to look at. Previously, JWST personnel have said that the telescope will be seeing fairly sharply by late April.

 

Even as the JWST works to hone its vision, a second key process is taking place in the background as the observatory sends the remaining heat from its time on Earth out into space. Because Webb is tuned to study the universe in infrared light, which also registers as heat, the observatory must be incredibly cold to obtain accurate data.

 

NASA scientists expect that the golden primary mirror will reach temperatures as low as minus 370 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 223 degrees Celsius or 50 degrees Kelvin); instruments must be even colder, according to an agency statement.

In addition to the image of HD 84406, NASA also shared a "selfie" image that the observatory took using a special lens targeting the observatory's primary mirror to assist during the alignment process.

All told, scientists are thrilled about the observatory's progress.

 

"Launching Webb to space was of course an exciting event, but for scientists and optical engineers, this is a pinnacle moment, when light from a star is successfully making its way through the system down onto a detector," Michael McElwain, Webb observatory project scientist, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center said in the statement.

[amovos]

The selfie had me laughing  

Cool science though!

[Haruhi Suzumiya]

Can't wait for them to start using it to it's full potential.  Have been waiting forevvverrrr.   Thanks for the post and keep them coming! 

[RedBaird]

The Webb telescope is in orbit at the "L2 Lagrange Point"

 

Quote

A location almost 1 million miles away called L2, or the second Sun-Earth Lagrange point. These points are places where the gravities of the sun and the Earth interact so that a small body like a spacecraft will stay in place as it moves with them.

 

I was not really aware that other missions, probes and satellites had used any of the LaGrange points! 😮   I did not 'expand my mind' beyond Earth-Sun-Moon to realize that other planets and objects might have Lagrange Points, too! 😮 

 

List of objects at Lagrange points - Wikipedia

 

The Lagrange points in any "two-body system".

 

 

Lagrange points of the Earth-Moon system:  Lagrange Points of the Earth-Moon System (gsu.edu)

 

 

When writing this post, I began to wonder if our Moon affects our Earth-Sun Lagrange points.

 

How Moon and other planets affect Earth-Sun lagrange points locations? - Space Exploration Stack Exchange

 

It looks like Webb was positioned at L2 to be in the Sun-shadow of the Earth! 😄

 

This is all very fascinating stuff!  🥙 (= "stuffed_flatbread, the closest emoji that I find to "stuff" here 😄 )

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[LazyHippo]

Very interesting facts Baird, you explained it with apples. 😄 

 

Now, this modern telescope finished the 1st major stage in its long process of aligning the observatory's 18 segmented primary mirror:

 

A single star that the observatory looked at was deliberately rendered 18 times into a hexagonal shape. Eventually, those 18 images will perfectly align into a single, sharp focus, but the interim result portrays a star repeated perfectly in a hexagonal pattern reminiscent of a stunning celestial snowflake.

 

"The resulting image shows that the team has moved each of Webb’s 18 primary mirror segments to bring 18 unfocused copies of a single star into a planned hexagonal formation," NASA officials wrote in a blog post Friday (Feb. 18).

 

 

A single star repeats in a hexagonal pattern in this image during James Webb Space Telescope's alignment, released on Feb. 18, 2022. (Image credit: NASA/STScI/J. DePasquale)
 

 

The star images are steered into this particular pattern "so that they have the same relative locations as the physical mirrors," Matthew Lallo, systems scientist and telescopes branch manager at the Space Telescope Science Institute, which manages Webb, said in the release.

Next, the observatory will begin what engineers call "segment alignment," which will fix any larger positioning errors in the individual segments of the primary mirror and update the secondary mirror's alignment.

 

Once segment alignment is finished successfully, the team will start the third phase — "image stacking" — that will ultimately bring the 18 images on top of each other into one clear view. 

 

Lallo said the three-phase procedure will allow the team to experience "an intuitive and natural way of visualizing changes" throughout the process. Another benefit, he added, is "we can now actually watch the primary mirror slowly form into its precise, intended shape."

Properly aligning the mirrors is a main goal of Webb's commissioning, which is expected to conclude in the summer. The mission launched Dec. 25, 2021, with an ambitious mission to look at the early universe, exoplanets and other points of interest in the cosmos.

[LazyHippo]

So the NASA unveils the first science-quality images from the James Webb Space Telescope:

 

This engineering image captured by the Fine Guidance Sensor reveals the deepest view of the universe in infrared light to date. (Image credit: NASA, CSA, and FGS team)

 

 

On Wednesday (July 7), NASA released an engineering image taken by the observatory's Fine Guidance Sensor — not a science tool but an engineering instrument that keeps the telescope pointing properly. Still, the new image is currently the deepest ever view of the universe and promises good things to come from the observatory.

 

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope can now capture sharp images of celestial objects with multiple instruments, the agency announced April 28, 2022. (Image credit: NASA/STScI)
 

NASA's view of deep space just got sharper.

 

The James Webb Space Telescope finished its alignment phase after demonstrating it can capture "crisp, well-focused images" with all four of its science instruments, the agency announced Wednesday (April 28).

 

The milestone, which NASA showcased with some new Webb images, allows the mission team to proceed with science instrument commissioning. The telescope will thus enter a new phase of preparation after several months of mirror and instrument alignments. This next step will take roughly two months, with Webb remaining on track to finish in June if everything goes to plan.
 

"These images have profoundly changed the way I see the universe," Scott Acton, Webb wavefront sensing and controls scientist at Ball Aerospace, said in the NASA statement. "We are surrounded by a symphony of creation; there are galaxies everywhere. It is my hope that everyone in the world can see them."

 

It's been a busy time for the $10 billion telescope since its launch on Dec. 25, 2021. First, Webb had to rocket to deep space, a process that took almost a month, and then it had a complex, seven-step alignment process to get through. Each milestone has gone pretty much to plan, with only minor tweaks required along the way.

A week ago, Webb officials reported that the 18 hexagonal segments of the scope's primary mirror were almost completely cooled to the deep-space temperatures they require to see objects sharply in infrared light. Now the mirrors appear to be ready, as they are sending "fully focused light" into every instrument, which in turn is rendering images.
 

Edited July 9, 2022 by LazyHippo

[LazyHippo]

A new image from the James Webb Telescope, this time the Tarantula Nebula:

 

In this mosaic image stretching 340 light-years across, Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) displays the Tarantula Nebula star-forming region in a new light, including tens of thousands of never-before-seen young stars that were previously shrouded in cosmic dust. (Image credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Webb ERO Production Team)
 

 

The James Webb Space Telescope has delivered a spectacular and unprecedented view of a star-forming region known as the Tarantula Nebula.

 

A combination of the James Webb Space Telescope's high-resolution infrared instruments reveal thousands of never-before-seen young stars in the stellar nursery, formally named 30 Doradus. 

The incredible new detail picked up by the $10 billion space telescope shows gas and dust in the nebula, as well as distant background galaxies.

 

The superb new detail in the image means Doradus 30, initially nicknamed Tarantula for its spider-like appearance, can now be seen to also resemble a burrowing tarantula's lair, lined with silk. 

The photo is the latest in a series of stunning images released from JWST, which launched on Christmas Day 2021 and released its first pictures in July. Recent images include a perfectly formed "Einstein ring."

 

The Tarantula Nebula is located 161,000 light-years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud and is the brightest star-forming region in the galaxies nearest to our Milky Way, collectively known as the Local Group.
 

 

A side-by-side display of the same region of the Tarantula Nebula brings out the distinctions between Webb's near-infrared (closer to visible red, left) and mid-infrared (further from visible red, right) images. (Image credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Webb ERO Production Team)
 

 

The nebula is of special interest to astronomers studying how stars form. The nebula has a similar type of chemical composition as star-forming regions from when the cosmos was only a few billion years old, thus offering a unique insight into how stars formed in the deep cosmic past.

 

JWST is a collaboration led by NASA with contributions from the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency.
 

[LazyHippo]

James Webb Space Telescope view of Saturn's weirdest moon Titan thrills scientists.
 

Titan is a strange world — a little bit Earthlike, if land were made of water ice, rivers and seas were filled with liquid methane and other hydrocarbons, and the atmosphere were thick and hazy, dotted with methane clouds. And now, the James Webb Space Telescope (Webb or JWST) has observed two of those clouds during observations on Nov. 4 that have thrilled scientists, according to a NASA statement.

 

"Fantastic! Love seeing the cloud and the obvious albedo markings," Heidi Hammel, a planetary scientist at the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy and a project lead for JWST's solar system work, wrote in an email shared in the statement, referring to glimpses of bright and dark regions of Titan's surface.
 

 

Two views of Saturn's moon Titan captured by the James Webb Space Telescope's NIRCam instrument.  (Image credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, Webb Titan GTO Team/Alyssa Pagan (STScI))
 

 

Conor Nixon, an astronomer at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, arranged for JWST to spend a total of 15 hours of its first year studying Titan. In particular, Nixon's team wanted to study Titan's atmosphere, aiming to map the distribution of the haze and identify new gases, among other goals.

 

And the scientists were thrilled at the data JWST sent them. "At first glance, it is simply extraordinary," Sebastien Rodriguez, an astronomer at the Université Paris Cité and colleague on the research, wrote in an email shared in the statement. "I think we're seeing a cloud!"

 

As they pored over the data, the researchers identified not one but two clouds, including, intriguingly, one located over Kraken Mare, the largest of Titan's seas. The scientists were soon inspired to find a way to check back in on those clouds to understand how they changed over time. The team reached out to the Keck Observatory in Hawai'i, which was able to snag observations of Titan just two days after JWST.
 

 

On the left, the James Webb Space Telescope Nov. 4, 2022, observations of Titan; on the right, Keck Observatory's view two days later.  (Image credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, Webb Titan GTO Team/Alyssa Pagan (STScI))

 

"We were concerned that the clouds would be gone when we looked at Titan two days later with Keck," Imke de Pater, an astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley, who leads Keck's observations of Titan, said in the statement. "But to our delight there were clouds at the same positions, looking like they had changed in shape."

 

However, that alignment doesn't necessarily mean Keck saw the same clouds as JWST. Scientists expected high cloud activity because Titan's northern hemisphere is experiencing late summer and catching more solar radiation, so Keck's clouds may have been freshly formed.

 

And the scientists aren't done mining the observations. They identified the clouds in images taken by JWST's Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam), a powerful camera that can image a target in several different wavelengths of light, which in the case of Titan allows scientists to separate out the lower atmosphere.

 

On the left, the James Webb Space Telescope Nov. 4, 2022, observations of Titan; in the middle, Keck Observatory's view two days later; on the right Keck's view Nov. 7, 2022.  (Image credit: NASA/STScI/W. M. Keck Observatory/Judy Schmidt)
 

 

But the researchers haven't even finished evaluating all of NIRCam's data, and a second instrument was also at work. The observatory's Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) gathered spectra. This technique splits light reflected off, for example, Titan's atmosphere and measures how much of each wavelength of light is present. The spectra should help scientists map what compounds are present in the lower atmosphere — including a strange bright spot over the moon's south pole.

 

JWST is also scheduled to return its sharp gaze to Titan in May or June 2023, according to the statement, this time using its Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI), which will refine scientists' understanding of the chemicals in the moon's strange, hazy atmosphere.

 

Observations of Titan are particularly important now, in a lull between spacecraft visitors to the icy moon. NASA's Cassini mission arrived at Saturn in 2004 and flew past the moon more than a hundred times before the spacecraft's demise in 2017. And NASA is working on a new mission, called Dragonfly, which is dedicated to Titan and will see a drone flying through the hazy skies, allowing scientists to study the moon from some two dozen vantage points.