In July 2011, the below image of the Carina Nebula in the constellation of the Ship's Keel looked like it might never exist.

At that time, a committee of the US House of Representatives was pushing for the cancellation of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).

Originally budgeted at $500 million, the project was four years behind schedule and had already cost $3 billion.

After the company was saved from the red pencil, it took another ten years and an additional seven billion dollars before the successor to the aging Hubble Space Telescope could be launched – by far the most expensive unmanned mission in space history to date.

Ulf von Rauchhaupt

Editor in the “Science” section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sunday newspaper.

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But what a happy ending!

On Monday evening, US President Joe Biden personally presented one of the first five JWST scientific images, together with his Vice President Kamala Harris, in their capacity as Chair of the National Space Council.

Another four were released by NASA and the space agencies of Europe and Canada involved in the telescope on Tuesday afternoon.

They are still the results of "practice runs", as NASA program scientist Eric Smith put it, i.e. warm-up exercises for the preparation of the data.

However, unlike the previous test images, they were intended for celestial objects of increased scientific interest.

However, their selection was aimed at enhancing the capabilities of the in 1,

The Carina Nebula is a place where cosmic dust and gas masses form stars and are shaped and made to glow by their radiation.

In previous images of this area, these young stars have remained hidden behind the clouds from which they formed.

With the JWST, however, you can now see them because, unlike Hubble, the mirrors and instruments here are specially designed for infrared light.

In order to obtain an image that our eyes can perceive, the data was transposed into the visible spectral range, so to speak.

But no viewer should be bothered by that.

Even astrophotographs taken in visible light do not show the celestial objects as things in themselves, nor as an astronaut would see them if he got close enough.

Another of the five images shows an object very similar to the Ring Nebula in Lyra, the so-called Southern Ring Nebula in the constellation of Vela, the Sail.

Here, the JWST was able to resolve the foamy structure of a dying star's expelled gas envelope and the layered structure of the plumes, which testify to the last pulsations before its demise.

On top of that, another mid-infrared image made it possible to visualize the partner with whom it orbits in a binary star system.