Photo: NASA/Chris Gunn
At the end of 2021, after many, many years of waiting, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) departed Earth, heading for a point in space called Lagrange 2, and located some 930,000 miles (1.5 million km) away from our planet.
That location was chosen on account of several reasons, including the fact that it provides the telescope with a stable anchor point between the Earth and the Sun, and that it offers an unobstructed view of the naked Universe.
From there, the telescope will have to look back in time, at the light coming from millions of years in our reality’s past, in a bid to unlock the mysteries of the stars formed immediately after the Big Bang, to look for signs of alien life, and who knows what other exciting things.
The JWST has been fully deployed for a while now, and we’ve already seen glimpses of what it can do through the few images released earlier this year, while calibration was in full swing.
But the first true science images are expected on July 12, at 10:30 a.m. EDT, when the operators of the telescope, NASA, ESA, and the CSA, will dazzle the world with the first “full-color images and spectroscopic data” obtained by the Webb.
NASA doesn’t say how many images are there, but it does add they’ll be released one by one, and we kind of hope that means each of them, meant to “demonstrate Webb at its full power, ready to begin its mission,” is truly spectacular in nature.
The space agencies plan to make a spectacle of the whole thing and are prepared to spread the word about Webb’s achievements through several means. First, we’ve got a televised broadcast from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. Then, each photo will be made available on the agencies' social media, but also on a specially-created webpage.
And, if you were hoping someone would leak an image or two to the media, think again, as NASA says not even the press will not receive anything prior to the public release.
From there, the telescope will have to look back in time, at the light coming from millions of years in our reality’s past, in a bid to unlock the mysteries of the stars formed immediately after the Big Bang, to look for signs of alien life, and who knows what other exciting things.
The JWST has been fully deployed for a while now, and we’ve already seen glimpses of what it can do through the few images released earlier this year, while calibration was in full swing.
But the first true science images are expected on July 12, at 10:30 a.m. EDT, when the operators of the telescope, NASA, ESA, and the CSA, will dazzle the world with the first “full-color images and spectroscopic data” obtained by the Webb.
NASA doesn’t say how many images are there, but it does add they’ll be released one by one, and we kind of hope that means each of them, meant to “demonstrate Webb at its full power, ready to begin its mission,” is truly spectacular in nature.
The space agencies plan to make a spectacle of the whole thing and are prepared to spread the word about Webb’s achievements through several means. First, we’ve got a televised broadcast from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. Then, each photo will be made available on the agencies' social media, but also on a specially-created webpage.
And, if you were hoping someone would leak an image or two to the media, think again, as NASA says not even the press will not receive anything prior to the public release.
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