2LT International News

WASHINGTON D.C.: NASA will soon present the first full-color images from its revolutionary James Webb Space Telescope, designed to peer through the cosmos to the beginnings of the universe.

The highly anticipated unveiling, scheduled for this week at the White House, of pictures and spectroscopic data follows a six-month process of fine tuning and focusing the newly launched telescope.

The first group of photos, which have taken weeks to process from raw telescope data, are expected to offer a compelling preview of what is expected to be captured by Webb, built for the U.S. space agency by aerospace giant Northrop Grumman.

Last week, NASA announced a list of the five celestial subjects chosen for Webb’s future photographing, including two nebulae, enormous clouds of gas and dust blasted into space by stellar explosions that form nurseries for new stars, and two sets of galaxy clusters.

NASA said one of these objects features is so massive that it can act as “gravitational lenses,” a visual distortion of space that greatly magnifies the light coming from behind them to expose even fainter objects farther away, whose origins travel back in time.

NASA will also present Webb’s first spectrographic analysis of a planet, 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, but NASA officials stressed that Webb will capture images of its subjects in an entirely new light.

During a news briefing on 29th June, NASA deputy administrator Pam Melroy said, “What I have seen moved me as a scientist, as an engineer and as a human being.”

Also, NASA said one unspecified image will be unveiled this week by U.S. President Joe Biden at a White House briefing.

The remaining photos will be released as previously scheduled during a live broadcast and webcast from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, by NASA and its European and Canadian space agency collaborators.