During a press conference on July 12, the world had a ringside seat to the most remarkable images of the universe ever captured. Over the course of the hour, five images left us wanting more. This is only the tip of the cosmic iceberg. The depth-of-field image (top) showed thousands of galaxies, including some that appear stretched. This is not a defect of the telescope. It is the distortion caused by gravity from a large foreground galaxy. Einstein predicted this warping or curvature of the fabric of spacetime, like someone standing on a trampoline where the mat is warped. The larger the object, the greater the distortion of light. To demonstrate James Webb’s power, the region of space where the depth-of-field image was captured was as small as a grain of sand held at arm’s length. This cluster is 4.6 billion light years away. This is the time it took for light to reach us from behind when our sun and planets were slowly formed from the solar nebula. Launched on December 25, 2021, the mighty Ariane 5 rocket delivered the seven-ton James Webb Space Telescope into space, where it deployed and gracefully continued its journey. It traveled for another 30 days, to its final position (known as Lagrange 2), a point in space about 1.5 million kilometers from Earth (or about four times the Earth-Moon distance). Gary Boyle Unlike the Hubble Space Telescope—which launched in 1990 with a faulty mirror that required a repair mission in 1993 outfitting it with corrective lenses—James Webb is too far away for a servicing mission. Who knows if there will be such a mission down the road if needed, but for now, there are no plans to ever visit the telescope. The $10 billion project is a collaboration between NASA, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency, along with private companies. Canada’s contribution is the Fine Guidance Sensor (FGS), used to point the massive telescope as well as the Near-Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph (NIRISS). An apparent landscape of “mountains” and “valleys” tricks the eye in this James Webb Space Telescope image of a young star-forming region in the Carina Nebula called NGC-3324.NASA/CSA/ESA/STScl Thousands of people around the world worked on this project, which began in 1996. At the time, it was called the next-generation telescope. In 2002, the name was changed to the James Webb Space Telescope, after the man who was NASA administrator from 1961 to 1968. These were the early days of the Mercury, Gemini and, especially, Apollo space programs. The Webb project suffered redesign setbacks along the way (and the COVID-19 pandemic didn’t help matters). When completed, the 18 gold-plated hexagonal honeycomb-style mirrors had a total width of 6.5 meters, compared to Hubble’s single 2.4-meter mirror. This results in more light-gathering power along with its infrared ability to observe thermal signatures through clouds of interstellar dust. Another critical part of the telescope is the sun shield, which measures the size of a tennis court. Composed of a lightweight material with special thermal properties, the five layers will provide a shield from heat and sunlight—as well as the heat of its own organs allowing the sensitive infrared to function without interference. The mirror will operate at -223 degrees Celsius and the rest of the equipment near absolute zero, or -273 degrees Celsius.
The James Webb Space Telescope has opened a news portal to discovery. In the wise words of Carl Sagan, “Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.” Will we someday see the first stars and small galaxies dating back 13.8 billion years, since the Big Bang that started our universe? Only time will tell.
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