The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the largest, most expensive and most complex observatory ever launched into space, will release its first smooth images on July 12, six months after its exciting launch.
Aiming to surpass Hubble’s success, JWST will be able to look much further back in time than any other telescope. The primary science goals were decided years ago, but the brains behind the mission kept the subject of the first full-color images a secret. But it is said to be mind-blowing for anyone.
“Our goals for Webb’s initial images and data are to both showcase the telescope’s powerful tools and preview the future science mission,” says Klaus Pontoppidan, JWST project scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STSc).
The telescope’s main task is described as reaching deep into the cosmos by looking back in time to shed light on the birth of the first galaxies. It is also hoped that it may not identify distant exoplanets by examining their atmospheres to determine whether they could potentially harbor life.
The process of deciding what JWST should look at first has been going on for five years. In 2017, initial targets for JWST were announced as looking at the star formation process, Jupiter and its moons, atmospheres around exoplanets, and the study of superheated regions around massive black holes known as quasars. Since these are among the first targets of JWST, we can predict that one of them will be featured in the first images to be released next month, but there is no word on which one will be selected.
The footage will be released on July 12 at 10:30 am EDT and we will be able to watch the broadcast live via this link or through various NASA social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube.
After 14 years of long delays, JWST was launched into space on Christmas Day 2021. Reaching its final destination, L2, the second Lagrange Point about 1.5 million kilometers from Earth, by late January 2022, it spent the next few months deploying, calibrating and testing its own array of vehicles.
The first test images have already been released, showing that the telescope’s optics meet and even exceed expectations. Soon we will have the opportunity to see the first fruits of this labor and the full potential of JWST.
But no one, including the researchers on the mission, is sure what these images, which will be the beginning of JWST’s real mission, will look like visually.
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