The First Full Image From The James Webb Space Telescope Has Been Released
The first full image from the James Webb Space Telescope has been released and it's absolutely stunning.
President Joe Biden unveiled the picture during a huge ceremony in the United States.
A full set of pictures taken by the telescope during its first moments of activity is set to be released on July 12, however authorities wanted to give everyone a sneak preview.
The first full image showcases the Webb Telescope's undeniable power and ingenious technology.
It's here–the deepest, sharpest infrared view of the universe to date: Webb's First Deep Field.
— NASA (@NASA) July 11, 2022
Previewed by @POTUS on July 11, it shows galaxies once invisible to us. The full set of @NASAWebb's first full-color images & data will be revealed July 12: https://t.co/63zxpNDi4I pic.twitter.com/zAr7YoFZ8C
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson says one of the pictures being released on July 12 will be 'the deepest image of our universe that has ever been taken'.
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The telescope's upgraded infrared resolution and sensitivity allows it to view celestial objects too old, distant, or faint to have been captured before, promising to fill our critical gap in knowledge between the Big Bang and the earliest galaxies.
It was launched on a European Ariane 5 rocket from the Kourou, French Guiana site in South America on Christmas Day (25 December) last year.
Ever since then, it has been slowly unfurling and turning on all its bells and whistles.
A few tests had to be done to ensure the telescope would be able to carry out its mission and it looks like it's all been positive so far.
Back in January, one of the biggest tests was making sure the sun shield was able to be deployed.
The kite-shaped, five-membrane sun shield, which is roughly the size of a tennis court, was designed to protect the telescope from the heat and light from the Sun, Earth and Moon.
There were 344 single-point parts that had to be remotely moved into place and they all did their job perfectly.
When that test was successful, it was billed as 'one of the most challenging' steps in the machine's setup.
The telescope will work alongside the Hubble Space Telescope in our cosmos but will sit much further out into space than its more than 30-year-old predecessor.
This is it: we’ve just wrapped up one of the most challenging steps of our journey to #UnfoldTheUniverse.
— NASA Webb Telescope (@NASAWebb) January 4, 2022
With all five layers of sunshield tensioning complete, about 75% of our 344 single-point failures have been retired! pic.twitter.com/P9jJhu7bJX
This new space telescope, which cost a whopping $10 billion to create, is hell of a lot bigger than the Hubble.
It features a 6.5 metre mirror, more than double the size of Hubble's 2.4m one. The upsized mirror will mean it's between 10 and 100 times more sensitive than the Hubble.
The James Webb Space Telescope, will attempt to look back 13.7 billion years back in time, 100 million years after the Big Bang and will give researchers a chance to look at how the universe was formed.
The telescope, which will be managed by Baltimore's The Space Telescope Science Institute, will give around five to 10 years of observations.
Stewart Perrie