The day will come when all astronomers and the general public will “wow” when they see the photos. After half a year of flight and commissioning, NASA announced that the first full-color scientific images and spectral data from the Webb Space Telescope will be released on July 12.
The Webb Telescope is the largest and most complex space telescope ever launched, with a cost of more than 10 billion US dollars. It will be launched at 7:20 (ET) on December 25, 2021, to the L2 Lagrangian point of the Sun-Earth system. In the past six months, fine-tuning work such as the sunshade and the main mirror, the calibration of the instrument and each split mirror has been carried out successively.
The Webb telescope team has also shared several exquisite images a while ago, but those are temporary alignment images taken to evaluate the adjustment results, and the full-color image released on July 12 will be the completion of all the telescope’s instruments. The high-quality results taken after calibration and debugging, NASA believes that these photos will surely make all astronomers and the general public exclaim “wow”.
It took NASA, ESA, and CSA 5 years to decide on the first scientific imaging targets. The full-color image also means that it will contain spectral data, allowing astronomers to further infer elemental composition or other information. Because the Webb telescope is very powerful, the results will be released. It’s been hard to predict what the new images will show, and maybe we’ll have a chance to see galaxies in the early universe emerge.
After the release of this full-color image on July 12, the scientific mission of the Webb Telescope will officially begin, and the objects of interest during the first year of Cycle 1 observations have also been made public on the website.
(Source of the first image: NASA)