Drawing back the curtain to a photo gallery unlike any other, NASA will soon present the first full-colour images from its James Webb Space Telescope, a revolutionary apparatus designed to peer through the cosmos to the dawn of the universe.
The highly anticipated unveiling this week of pictures and spectroscopic data from the newly operational observatory follows a six-month process of remotely unfurling various components, aligning its mirrors and calibrating instruments.
NASA on Friday posted a list of the five celestial subjects chosen for its showcase debut of Webb, built for the U.S. space agency by aerospace giant Northrop Grumman Corp. NASA will also present Webb's first spectrographic analysis of an exoplanet - one roughly half the mass of Jupiter that lies more than 1,100 light years away - revealing the molecular signatures of filtered light passing through its atmosphere.All five of the Webb's introductory targets were previously known to scientists. One of them, the galaxy group 290 million light-years from Earth known as Stephan's Quintet, was first discovered in 1877.
The US$9 billion infrared telescope, the largest and most complex astronomical observatory ever sent to space, was launched on Christmas Day from French Guiana, on the northeastern coast of South America. The larger light-collecting surface of Webb's primary mirror - an array of 18 hexagonal segments of gold-coated beryllium metal - enables it to observe objects at greater distances, thus further back in time, than Hubble or any other telescope.
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