The long-awaited giant leap in astronomy is just around the corner as a $10 billion observatory located nearly 15,00,000 kilometers from home is set to take us beyond the realm of imagination and into a realm of possibilities that were once only imagined.
The first scientific image taken by the world's most powerful observatory will drop on Tuesday.
Although closely guarded against the target of this first observation, NASA has been releasing teasers over the past six months as the telescope has appeared in the darkness of space after it was launched late last year. While the destination remains a mystery, there are indications that the data released will include "the deepest views of space ever taken and spectra obtained from the atmospheres of exoplanets."
The images released over the past few months are so stunning that they apparently brought Thomas Zarbuchen, who is the Associate Administrator of NASA's Science Mission Directorate (SMD), to tears!
Operating at infrared wavelengths not available from Earth, Webb is the only current instrument capable of providing unprecedented views of the universe at these wavelengths, which are expected to contain light from some of the first galaxies to form in the universe. Potentially life-harboring signatures in exoplanetary atmospheres.
The primary data products delivered by JWST will be images and spectra. Spectra contain highly complementary information regarding emission and absorption from atoms and molecules that are vital to understanding. For example, the chemical composition of stars and gas in distant galaxies and the atmospheres of planets orbiting other stars.
The spectrum is created by dividing light from astrophysical sources into wavelength ranges. While the image provides information about the total brightness of the object in the photometric filter through which it is monitored, the spectrum provides information about the object's differential brightness across the entire range of wavelengths covered by that filter.
The first observational plan for JWST is to focus on parts of the sky that have already been observed with the Hubble Space Telescope over the past few decades in order to study the formation and evolution of the universe's most distant galaxies. This will allow JWST observations to immediately build on the incredible value of existing HST data and provide complementary observations at previously unattainable infrared wavelengths. This would enable spectroscopic monitoring of distant, extremely faint galaxies already identified by HST, as well as detection of even more distant galaxies that HST is unable to detect due to light from the universe's most distant objects. Infrared wavelengths undergo a "red shift."
What's certain is that whatever NASA decides to show at its JWST First Images event, these glimpses of space will be humanity's first-ever foray into uncharted territory.
This event is a historic moment not only for astronomers like me, but for humanity in general, reminding us once again that the sky we live under is the same for all creatures and that we are just a speck of dust in the incredible vastness of the universe, which has billions of stars, trillions of galaxies and quadrillion possibilities.
While the release of the first image is still a few weeks away, the spacecraft is currently undergoing final system checks to ensure all instruments are ready and in a healthy state to see first light. The probe recently drew global attention when it released images of a star system it observed to see how its 18 hexagonal mirrors work together to produce a single, coordinated image.
You must be logged in to post a comment.