James Webb Telescope Update.

“Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.” Carl Sagan

Back in the February issue of Discover Pattaya, we celebrated the launch of the James Webb space telescope, and its arrival at Lagrange point 2. What followed in the remaining months was a lengthy period of calibrating the mirrors and testing communication. All went smoothly until the end of May when it sustained an impact to one of its mirror segments from a small meteoroid fortunately the team at NASA was able to compensate for this.

Seeing as it’s too far away for a repair team to travel let’s hope it remains undisturbed. At the time of writing US President Joe Biden revealed to the world the very first images sent back from the JWT.
The JWT supersedes the Hubble Telescope which was launched back in 1990, its mirror is almost three times as large, also Hubble was deployed a lot closer to the earth at 550 Km vs 1,500,000.
I remember the Deep field images from Hubble being astounding as we discovered even more Galaxies. With the advantages that the JWT has, we will be able to look back in time even further right back to the very start as stars formed after the big bang. The other advantage the JWT has over Hubble is that it captures images in the infrared spectrum whereas Hubble captured only in the ultraviolet.
With the images being released on the internet it’s advantageous to view the largest ones you can find especially if you have a 4K display or 8K for the fortunate few. In the meantime enjoy these images in the magazine.

Stay tuned to the latest news from James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) & Astronomical Discoveries on Facebook and https://www.jwst.nasa.gov/