James Webb Telescope Just Released NEW images that THRILLED the scientist's mind

NASA just hit another big milestone with James Webb. Its $10 billion machine has successfully completed two further steps to align the mirrors. Notably, the resulting performance indicates that Webb will meet or exceed its design goals. So, how important exactly is this and what's next for the James Webb Space Telescope? Let's find out in today's episode of Great SpaceX. NASA officials revealed in a news conference held virtually on Wednesday that the James Webb Space Telescope's main mirror is fully aligned and performing even better than it had been designed to do. The 21.3-foot-wide mirror composed of 18 hexagonal segments had to travel to space folded. Aligning it into one smooth reflecting surface was one of the main tasks that the Webb control team has had to tackle since the giant telescope's launch on December 25th. But now, difficulties have been left behind. The alignment process, which involved fine-tuning the positions and inclinations of the 18 segments with nanometer-scale precision, has now been completed. And although the overall process is not yet complete, the $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope mission, the most complex and most expensive observatory ever launched, is already producing images that take scientists' breath away. Jane Rigby, Webb Operations Project Scientist at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, said in the news conference that, Telescope performance so far is everything that we dared hope. The optics work. The goal here was to build a telescope 100 times more powerful than anything we've had before. The engineering images that we saw today are as sharp and as crisp as the images that Hubble can take, but are at a wavelength of light that is totally invisible to Hubble. So this is making the invisible universe snapping into very, very sharp focus. When the mirror alignment process started in early January, the ground team pointed the telescope at HD 84406, what the scientists described as a very boring star in our Milky Way galaxy. The star, 100 times fainter than what can be seen with the naked eye, was chosen not for its scientific significance, but purely for its brightness and location. At the beginning of the alignment process, the telescope was delivering 18 individual images of the star, with each of the primary mirror segments acting as a telescope on its own. And the image released on Wednesday shows a bright, shining, amber-colored star emanating streams of light across the universe. Even more interesting than the star itself, however, is its background, revealing dozens of specks and dots, each a distant galaxy that was previously out of reach. These distant galaxies make Webb's first image a so-called deep field. Such photographs, focusing on small sections of the sky, aim to capture the most distant objects in the universe. Deep fields are a specialty of the Hubble Space Telescope, the Webb's predecessor. Webb, however, is set to beat Hubble in its ability to peer into the depths. As Rigby said, there's no way that Webb can look for 2,000 seconds at any point in the sky and not get an incredibly deep field. This is going to be the future from now on. Wherever we look, it's a deep field. Without even really breaking a sweat, we're seeing back in time to galaxies that we're seeing the light as it looked billions of years ago. Randy Kimble, NASA's Webb Project Scientist for Integration, Test, and Commissioning told in an earlier interview that where Hubble requires weeks to obtain some of its best deep field images, Webb will accomplish the same results within hours. However, the two observatories don't image the universe in the same wavelengths. Hubble is an expert at visible and ultraviolet radiation, and Webb sits firmly in the realm of the infrared. NASA officials also pointed out in the briefing that the Webb Telescope was designed to be up to 100 times more sensitive than Hubble, and that goal has not just been accomplished, but exceeded. Lee Feinberg, Webb Optical Telescope Element Manager at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center said, and we said last fall that we would know that the telescope is working properly when we have an image of a star that looks like a star. And now we have that, and you're seeing that image. This is actually a 2100 second exposure, and I'm happy to say that the optical performance of the telescope is absolutely phenomenal. It is really working extremely well. It's that the performance is as good, if not better, than our most optimistic prediction. So we're really pleased with that. No other telescope before has been launched to space with a foldable mirror. To make the mission possible, the engineering teams at NASA and its partner organizations had to develop completely new technologies that had never been flown in space before. As a result, the James Webb Space Telescope project faced many delays and cost overruns. The work, however, has paid off as the telescope has sailed through all of its major commissioning milestones without the smallest hiccup. Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA's Associate Administrator for Science, said in the briefing that... We'll start out with Thomas for that question. So I'm really interested in other answers actually. I just want to tell you, of all the sleepless nights I've had, and kind of the worries I've had, they're all behind us now. And it's not because there's no path ahead. There's still a mountain to climb. There's important tests that need to be done, and important things that need to be proven, such as the alignment. There's also all the modalities in each one of the instruments needs to be tested and calibrated. Because even though there's still weeks and months ahead to really fully unleash the power of this new observatory there at L2, today we can announce that the optics will perform to specifications or even better. It's an amazing achievement. Well look, this is one of the most magnificent days in my whole career at NASA, frankly, and for many of us. And of course, we're happy for the new achievement. But still, remember that Webb is not finished yet. Today, the telescope's mirrors are still misaligned hundreds of microns or so of their desired locations. But in order to have the mirror segments all act as one, the mirrors need to be aligned within a few nanometers of one another. Thus, the team still has a bit of work to do. They will begin by finding the 18 spots of light, one for each of the telescope's mirrors, and gather those together. Marshall Perrin, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute says, we have 18 telescopes basically at this point. We're going to focus and align each of those telescopes one by one using defocused images to work out the misalignments of the mirrors. The biggest one honestly has been just how closely it matched the models and the predictions from the ground. It has been far closer to those predictions than a lot of us had dared to hope. The full process is expected to be done by May. Once it is up and running, the telescope is designed to look back at when the universe began, peering at ancient galaxies that formed shortly after the Big Bang. And so, it's expected to deliver both aesthetic value and scientific knowledge. Like Aaron Wolfe, a scientist on James Webb Space Telescope at Ball Aerospace said, some of what we're getting from the spectroscopy will be telling you how galaxies are rotating and how the gases of galaxies are getting blown out of them by supernova and determining what the composition of the gas and galaxies is. But what you get out of it is really, really cool. So, we will both be doing stuff that makes us giddy and happy and always gorgeous and stuff where we say, oh my god, now we know what that's made of that we never did before. And that's all the information we have for you today. If you enjoy what my team and I are doing and would like to continue supporting us in a huge way, you can become a patron through our Patreon link in the description below. And don't forget to tell us what you thought about today's content. Everyone's support motivates us to continue delivering quality content and to always improve. And as a quick note, if you have advertising needs, you can contact us directly via email. As always, this is Kevin with Great SpaceX and my team and I will see you next time.