In just a few days, the James Webb Space Telescope will celebrate its first year of commissioning. One year ago on Wednesday, the space observatory returned its first images, officially making the object a working vehicle. Now, NASA plans to celebrate Webb’s past 12 months with festivities all day Wednesday.
At 6:00 a.m. ET on Wednesday, July 12, the Webb Telescope team will release another new image from the observatory, likely to rival those first images revealed this time last year. The team will then share interview opportunities with various media outlets before broadcasting the NASA Science Live broadcast on NASA TV and their social media profiles.
Friday, NASA is hosting a free event at the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore to celebrate the telescope’s history, and the space agency says it has plans to continue releasing new images from the rover throughout the summer.
“The James Webb Space Telescope is the world’s premier space science observatory,” NASA says about the telescope. “Webb solves mysteries in our solar system, looks beyond distant worlds around other stars, and investigates mysterious structures and origins of the universe and our place in it. Webb is an international program led by NASA with its partners, ESA (European Space Agency) and CSA (Canadian Space Agency). )”.
What is the Webb Space Telescope?
In short, the Webb Observatory is the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope. With his new technology, scientists have been able to examine parts of the known universe that were previously unobservable.
“If you think about it, this is farther than humanity has moved before,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson previously said of JWST. “And we’re just beginning to understand what Webb can and will do. It will explore objects in the solar system and the atmospheres of exoplanets orbiting other stars, giving us clues about whether their atmospheres are similar to ours.”
“Our goals for the first images and data from Webb are to showcase the telescope’s powerful instruments and preview the next science mission,” added astronomer Klaus Pontopidan, Webb’s project scientist at STScI. “They are sure to deliver the long-awaited ‘wow’ for astronomers and the public.”
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