The James Webb telescope is able to see very faint objects.
JAKARTA—The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has set its sights on the Big Dipper. While there are still months to go before official scientific observations begin, a very bright star named HD 84406 will soon be the object of JWST’s attention.
“Starlight, bright star, the first star Webb will see is HD 84406, a sun-like star about 260 light-years away,” NASA officials tweeted Friday (28/1/2022). Twitter JWST official, quoted from Space, Sunday (30/1/2022).
HD 84406 is located in the constellation Ursa Major which means “Big Bear” in Latin. The Big Dipper Asterism (or star pattern) is actually part of this constellation, and it is the tail of this Great Bear.
The star has a visual magnitude of about 6.9, which is too faint to be seen with the naked eye. To see the stars, you need a telescope or high-power binoculars.
Now that JWST has reached its final destination in space, the mission team is preparing the next generation of space telescopes for observation. Bright spots like the HD 84406 provide helpful targets on which the team can align the JWST honeycomb-shaped mirrors and begin collecting data.
This star will play an important role for this special purpose, but will not be studied by the observatory after it has officially started its science project.
“HD 84406 will be too bright to study with Webb once the telescope begins to focus. But for now, it’s the perfect target to start a quest that will take us to a distant universe,” according to a NASA blog post published Thursday (27/1/2022).
This week has marked another important development for JWST. According to the blog post, the team has also activated JWST’s High-Gain Antenna and can now down-link observations via the Deep Space Network’s Ka radio band, a channel that provides significantly higher data rates for downloading images and science data for astronomers to analyze.
Source: Republic
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