Nasa Gives First Glimpse of James Webb Space Telescope

NASA has released the first images taken by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which show the telescope's 18 primary mirror segments perfectly aligned. This picture mosaic was made by directing the telescope towards HD 84406, a brilliant, lonely star in the constellation Ursa Major. This star was picked specifically because it is easily identifiable and is not crowded by other stars of comparable brightness, which helps to decrease background confusion, said the statement issued late Friday by the US space agency.


Each dot in the mosaic is tagged with the primary mirror section that caught it. What seems to be a basic snapshot of blurry starlight is being used to align and focus the telescope, allowing Webb to provide unparalleled views of the universe this summer. According to NASA, the crew will progressively modify the mirror segments over the next month or two until the 18 pictures merge into a single star.

"The whole Webb team is overjoyed with how  the first steps of capturing photographs and aligning the telescope are going." "We were overjoyed to see light enter NIRCam," said Marcia Rieke, chief scientist for the NIRCam device and regents professor of astronomy at the University of Arizona. Webb was repointed to 156 different points around the projected location of the star throughout the picture capture phase, which began on February 2, and generated 1,560 photos utilising NIRCam's 10 detectors, totaling 54 gigabytes of raw data.

Although the entire operation took over 25 hours, the observatory was able to find the target star in each of its mirror parts within the first six hours and 16 exposures. These photos were then stitched together to create a single, enormous mosaic capturing the signature of each major mirror section in a single frame. "This first search spanned a region almost the size of the full Moon since the segment dots may have been that spread out over the sky," said Marshall Perrin, Webb's deputy telescope scientist. Webb's photos will only get clearer, more detailed, and more complicated as time goes on.

The Webb project, a collaboration between the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Canadian Space Agency, was launched on December 25, last year. The $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope will study every phase of cosmic history, from inside our solar system to the farthest distant detectable galaxies in the early cosmos.