On July 12, the US space agency NASA will unveil the “deepest image ever taken of our universe,” taken by the new James Webb telescope. NASA CEO Bill Nelson has reported this.
“This is beyond anyone’s ever been able to see,” Nelson said at a press conference. James Webb, who is currently 1.5 million kilometers from Earth, can see that far into the cosmos because of his huge mirror and his instruments that pick up infrared signals, allowing him to peer through clouds of dust.
‘He will investigate objects from the solar system and the atmospheres of exoplanets orbiting other stars. This gives us clues as to whether their atmospheres might be similar to ours’, says Nelson. “And so we might be able to answer some of our questions: Where do we come from? What’s left? Who are we? And of course he will provide answers to questions we don’t even know yet.’
The American-European-Canadian viewer is worth about ten billion dollars and can look back to about 200 million years after the Big Bang. It was launched on Christmas Day with a European Ariane-5 launcher and also includes Belgian top technology. His instruments have been operational since late May and James Webb could remain operational for up to 20 years.
NASA previously announced that it would make the first color scientific images available to the world on July 12. It would also show the first spectroscopy of a distant planet, an exoplanet. Spectroscopy can reveal the chemical and molecular composition of distant objects. In the case of a planet, the technique can help to probe the atmosphere, detect water or analyze the soil.
–
