James Webb Space Telescope nearly ready to transform our view of the universe

After launching on Christmas morning, the telescope’s 6.5-meter mirror opened, and its tennis-court size sunshield unfolded in space.

Michael McElwain, Webb observatory project scientist with NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, said there are 1,000 steps in the commissioning phase of the telescope to get it ready for scientific observations, with now only about 200 steps left to complete.After releasing the first image taken by Webb of a star in April, NASA and its international partners shared a new picture on Monday taken during the commissioning of Webb’s instruments.

Rieke, an astronomer with the University of Arizona who also worked on the Spitzer telescope, said the team knew Webb’s images would be better because it has 18 mirror segments, each larger than Spitzer’s single mirror. “Until now, we’ve been limited by the angular resolution with the Spitzer performance, but suddenly you can resolve those into individual stars. You can see all the structures in that image,” Evans said. “It’s just going to transform our view of local galaxies, like the Magellanic Clouds. That will allow us to study the properties of stars in these different environments that are more similar to the galaxies in the early universe.

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