NASA unveiled the first images taken by the James Webb Space Telescope on Friday.

Far from being spectacular, these shots come from the calibration phase in which the telescope embarked a month after its launch, report our colleagues from Le

Point

.

“The whole team is delighted with the quality of the first stages of shooting and aligning the telescope.

We are so happy to see light entering NIRCam,” explained astronomer Marcia Rieke, principal investigator of the Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam) instrument.

The first image from the James-Webb telescope shows the same star 18 times, captured by each of the 18 segments of the device's primary mirror.

The 18 random dots featured in this video might not look like much, but they represent a big step forward in #NASAWebb's 3-month mirror alignment process and its quest to #UnfoldTheUniverse: https://t.co/YVrW6RTvOy



Let's connect the dots with a thread ⬇️ pic.twitter.com/yT8Chn1LSb

— NASA Webb Telescope (@NASAWebb) February 11, 2022

A blurry photo and a selfie

The idea of ​​this picture is to serve as a basis for the alignment of these 18 mirrors so that they finally form a single set of 6.5 meters in diameter.

Once this operation has been carried out, the telescope will be able to deliver a single photo of this same star and it will no longer be blurred at all, quite the contrary.

Picture bonus!

When it's time to focus, sometimes you need to take a good look at yourself.



This “selfie” taken by Webb of its primary mirror was not captured by an externally mounted engineering camera, but with a special lens within its NIRCam instrument.

#UnfoldTheUniverse pic.twitter.com/XtzCdktrCA

— NASA Webb Telescope (@NASAWebb) February 11, 2022

In total, this process should take about a hundred days.

Finally, in order to keep enthusiasts waiting, the telescope also took a kind of selfie using the internal NIRCam lens which is normally only used for calibration.

Science

The object that will crash into the Moon in March is not a piece of a SpaceX rocket

Science

But why could the Starlink project threaten "our understanding of the universe"?

  • Galaxy

  • Nasa

  • stars

  • Space

  • Science

  • 0 comment

  • 0 share

    • Share on Messenger

    • Share on Facebook

    • Share on Twitter

    • Share on Flipboard

    • Share on Pinterest

    • Share on Linkedin

    • Send by Mail

  • To safeguard

  • A fault ?

  • To print