NASA’s new space telescope has captured its first starlight and taken a selfie of its giant golden mirror.
All 18 main mirror segments on the James Webb Space Telescope appeared to function properly during the 1½ month mission, officials said Friday. The telescope’s first target is a bright star 258 light-years away in the constellation Ursa Major.
“It was an absolutely incredible moment,” said Marshall Perrin of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore.
Over the next few months, segments of the hexagonal mirrors—each about the size of a table in the living room—will be aligned and focused into one, allowing scientific observations to begin in late June. The $10 billion infrared observatory is thought to be the successor to the aging Hubble Space Telescope.
The Webb telescope will search for light from the first stars and galaxies that formed in the universe nearly 14 billion years ago. Webb will also examine the atmospheres of alien worlds for possible signs of life.
While everything seems good so far at Webb, engineers should be able to rule out a major mirror shortfall by next month, said Lee Feinberg, Webb’s optical telescope element manager.
The gold-plated, 6.5-meter-high Webb mirror is the largest ever launched into space. The infrared camera on the telescope takes a mirror image while one segment stares at the target star.
NASA released the resulting selfie, along with a mosaic of starlight from each mirror segment. The 18 points of starlight resemble bright fireflies flying in the dark night sky.
Webb was launched from South America in December and reached the designated spot 1.6 million kilometers last month. [ka/ah]
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