Issued on: 29/06/2022 – 22:50 Modified: 29/06/2022 – 22:48
WASHINGTON (AFP) – NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said Wednesday that the agency would unveil “the deepest image of our universe ever made” on July 12, thanks to the recent James Webb Space Telescope.
“If you think about it, it’s farther than humanity has ever seen,” Nelson said during a briefing at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, the $ 10 billion observatory’s operations center, which launched last December. is now orbiting the Sun millions of miles (1.5 million kilometers) from Earth.
A marvel of engineering, Webb is able to look farther into space than any telescope before him, thanks to its huge main mirror and its instruments, which focus on infrared rays, allowing it to peek through dust and gas.
“It will study objects in the solar system and the atmospheres of exoplanets orbiting other stars, giving us clues as to whether their atmospheres are potentially similar to ours,” Nelson added, speaking on the phone as he isolated himself with Covid.
“He can answer some questions we have: where do we come from? What else is there? Who are we? And of course he will answer some questions we don’t even know what the questions are.”
Webb’s infrared capabilities allow him to see deeper back in time to the Big Bang, which occurred 13.8 billion years ago.
As the universe expands, light from the earliest stars shifts from the ultraviolet and visible wavelengths in which it was emitted to longer infrared wavelengths – which Webb is equipped to detect at unprecedented resolutions.
Currently, the earliest cosmological observations date back to 330 million years since the Big Bang, but with the capacity of Web astronomers, they believe they will easily break the record.
20 years of life
In other good news, NASA Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy revealed that thanks to an effective launch by NASA partner Arianespace, the telescope could remain in service for 20 years, twice the life it was originally intended.
“These 20 years will not only allow us to go deeper into history and time, but we will go deeper into science because we have the opportunity to learn, grow and make new observations,” she said.
NASA also intends to share the Web’s first spectroscopy on a distant planet known as an exoplanet on July 12, said NASA lead scientist Thomas Zurbuchen.
Spectroscopy is a tool for analyzing the chemical and molecular composition of distant objects, and the planetary spectrum can help characterize the atmosphere and other properties, such as whether there is water and what the earth is.
“From the very beginning, we will look at these worlds there, which keep us awake at night as we look at the starry sky and wonder, as we look outside, is there life elsewhere?” Zurbuchen said.
Nestor Espinoza, an astronomer at STSI, told AFP that previous exoplanet spectroscopies performed using existing instruments were very limited compared to what Webb could do.
“It’s like being in a room that’s very dark and you only have a small hole to look through,” he told modern technology. Now, with the Web, “You open a huge window, you can see all the little details.”
© 2022 AFP
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