NASA's groundbreaking invention, Webb telescope to reveal first full color images from outer space

NASA will soon unveil the first full-color photographs from its James Webb Space Telescope, a ground-breaking technology created to look through space to the origin of the universe. After a six-month process of remotely unfolding various components, aligning its mirrors, and calibrating instruments, the newly operational telescope will reveal images and spectroscopic data this week, much to the excitement of the scientific community.

Astronomers will launch a competitively chosen list of science projects investigating the evolution of galaxies, the life cycles of stars, the atmospheres of far-off exoplanets, and the moons of our outer solar system after Webb has been quite well and completely focused. The initial batch of images, which have taken weeks to prepare from the raw telescope data, are likely to provide an exciting preview of what Webb will photograph on the upcoming science missions.

The five celestial objects picked by NASA for the spectacular launch of the Webb spacecraft, which was created for the American space agency by aerospace giant Northrop Grumman Corp., were announced on Friday. Two nebulae are vast clouds of gas and dust created by stellar explosions and serve as the cradles for young stars, and two sets of galaxy groups are among them. According to NASA, one of them has foreground objects that are so enormous they function as "gravitational lenses," bending space in a way that exposes even fainter things deeper away and further in the past. What was captured on video and how far back are both unclear.

READ | What is animal rain? Know instances when animals rained from sky

Additionally, NASA will show off Webb's first spectrographic investigation of an exoplanet, one that is more than 1,100 light years away and nearly half the mass of Jupiter, revealing the chemical traces of filtered light travelling through its atmosphere. Scientists were aware of each of Webb's five initial targets. One of these, the Stephan's Quintet galaxy group, lies 290 million light-years from Earth and was first identified in 1877. However, according to NASA experts, Webb's imaging genuinely catches its objects in a completely new light. "What I have seen moved me as a scientist, as an engineer and as a human being," NASA deputy administrator Pam Melroy, who has analysed the images, told reporters during a June 29 media briefing.

At a White House meeting with NASA Administrator Bill Nelson on Monday evening, U.S. President Joe Biden will reveal one unidentified image from the collection, the space agency announced on Sunday. The remaining information will be made available as previously planned on Tuesday during a live broadcast and webcast by NASA and its partners from the European and Canadian space agencies from Greenbelt, Maryland's Goddard Space Flight Center. The largest and most sophisticated astronomical telescope ever carried into space, the $9 billion infrared telescope, was deployed from French Guiana, off the northeastern coast of South America, on Christmas Day.

READ | Fastest star takes four years to travel around the black hole at the centre of our galaxy, says study

A month later, the device, weighing 14,000 pounds (6,350 kg), had arrived at its gravitational parking location in solar orbit and was orbiting the sun alongside Earth at a distance of almost one million miles. Compared to its 30-year-old predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope, which orbits Earth from a distance of 340 miles (547 km) and mostly observes objects in the optical and ultraviolet spectrum, Webb is nearly 100 times more sensitive. Webb's primary mirror, which is a network of 18 hexagonal segments of gold-coated beryllium metal, has a larger light-collecting surface than Hubble's or any other telescope's, allowing it to view objects at greater distances and, consequently, farther back in time.

Due to its infrared sensitivity, it can see light sources that are normally hidden in the visible spectrum by gas and dust. When combined, these characteristics are predicted to revolutionise astronomy by giving us the first look at young galaxies that were formed barely 100 million years after the Big Bang, the hypothetical flashpoint that started the known universe expanding around 13.8 billion years ago. With the help of Webb's instruments, it is also possible to examine planets far closer to Earth, such as Mars and Saturn's ice moon Titan, as well as a large number of newly discovered plants that circle far-off stars.

In addition to the numerous research projects already planned for Webb, the telescope's most ground-breaking discoveries might turn out to be ones that are not yet expected. Such was the case in Hubble's unexpected finding that the universe's expansion is speeding rather than slowing down from measurements of far-off supernovas, establishing a new branch of astrophysics dedicated to an unexplained phenomenon known as dark energy.

READ | Space Policy 2022: Private entities will now own imaging satellites as well, says ISRO Chairman Dr S Somanath

(With Reuters input)