Just a few days after completing the alignment phase of its scientific instruments, James Webb Space Telescope already gives us a glimpse of its incredible potential.
The largest and most powerful ever sent into space, located 1.5 billion kilometers from Earth, is ready to explore the farthest reaches of the Universe, NASA announced on April 28. Its four powerful instruments, namely three imagers and a spectrograph, successfully aligned with the main mirror 6.5 meters in diameter. All have reached their operational temperature and are in battle order to begin their scientific mission.
While waiting for the first images of scientific observation, which should begin this summer, NASA has posted several images captured by the telescope online to prove that these instruments are able to capture sharp and well-targeted images, of a quality and of an unprecedented resolution, without common measure with the images produced by other telescopes until now.
The first photo shows images of stars and gas from the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small dwarf satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, taken by the Mirim instrument. “This first image was immediately magnificent because we saw the quality of images we were looking for” tweeted the scientific manager of the Mirim at the CEA, Pierre-Olivier Lagage.