NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has captured its first much-anticipated image and even taken a selfie of its giant gold mirror. All 18 segments of the primary mirror on the new telescope seem to be working properly one and a half months into the mission, officials said Friday.
The telescope’s first target was a bright star 258 light-years away in the constellation Ursa Major, known as HD 84406. “That was just a real wow moment,” said Marshall Perrin of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, reports the Associated Press.
In a blog, NASA points out that there is still a long way to go in the approximately six-month-long process of aligning the observatory’s primary mirror using the Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam) instrument.
This involved getting confirmation that the NIRCam was ready to collect light from celestial objects and then identify starlight from the same star in each of the 18 primary mirror segments.
This process – which took over 25 hours beginning on Feb. 2, during the ongoing process to align the observatory’s segmented mirror – resulted in an image mosaic of 18 randomly organized dots of starlight.
The image is the product of Webb’s unaligned mirror segments all reflecting light from the same star back at Webb’s secondary mirror and into NIRCam’s detectors. And while the image might not look like much, it is very important.
“The entire Webb team is ecstatic at how well the first steps of taking images and aligning the telescope are proceeding,” Marcia Rieke, principal investigator of the instrument that Webb relies on for the alignment procedure and an astronomer at the University of Arizona, said in a NASA statement.
During the remainder of the commissioning process, scientists are focusing on waking and calibrating the observatory’s instruments and making the minute adjustments to the telescope’s 18 golden mirror segments that are necessary for crisp, clear images.
“The first images are going to be ugly,” Jane Rigby, Webb operations project scientist, said during a news conference held on Jan. 8 as the telescope began the process of unstowing its mirrors, reports Space.com. “It is going to be blurry. We’ll [have] 18 of these little images all over the sky.”
Even as Webb works to hone its vision, a second key process is also taking place in the background. Because Webb is tuned to study the universe in infrared light, which also registers as heat, the observatory must be incredibly cold to obtain accurate data.
NASA scientists expect that the golden primary mirror will reach temperatures as low as minus 370 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 223 degrees Celsius or 50 degrees Kelvin); However, instruments must be even colder, according to an agency statement.
“Star light, star bright … the first star Webb will see is HD 84406, a sun-like star about 260 light-years away,” NASA officials wrote on Twitter on Jan. 28.
