Five Amazing Photos from the James Webb Telescope
The James Webb Space Telescope telescope has finally released its first images, five amazing cosmos photographs, which are pretty mind-blowing. It’s been twenty-five years in the making, and the pictures do not disappoint.
--
Below I will go through the first five photos and some history of the telescope. The James Webb Space Telescope is a space telescope that is the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope. It is named after James Webb, the second administrator of NASA who played a vital role in the Apollo program. The telescope was launched on Christmas day 2021 on an Ariane 5 rocket from Kourou, French Guiana. It is positioned a million miles from Earth in the second Lagrangian point or L2.
L2 is one of five points in space where the combined gravitational pull of the sun and Earth allow a spacecraft to maintain a stable position. From this location, Webb will have an uninterrupted view of the universe free from the interference of our home planet.
After months of unfurling, testing and calibrating it's ready for its science mission.
What is the James Webb Space Telescope, and why is it important?
The James Webb Space Telescope is one of the most complex ever built with its eighteen hexagonal mirrors, which are extremely precise. It has a shield the size of a tennis court to block out the sun because it is an infra-red space telescope; it needs to be colder than the space it is photographing hence the shield.
When the first space telescope called Hubble was launched into space, the images it beamed back to Earth were so impressive that they changed how we understood the universe. The Hubble Space Telescope used visible light, but the James Webb Space Telescope uses Infrared light. The James Webb Space Telescope, the next-generation space telescope, is set to have the same impact. Its eighteen mirrors are nearly seven times the size of the Hubble telescope, and its detectors are so sensitive that they can detect the heat signature of an exoplanet. In other words, this telescope will show us things we’ve never seen before.
