A6 BAKER CITY HERALD • THURSDAY, JULY 14, 2022
SCIENCE
JAMES WEBB SPACE TELESCOPE
Early images from NASA reveal stunning details
BY CORINNE PURTILL AND
SUMEET KULKAMI
Los Angeles Times
Billions of years ago, long
before a swirling cloud of gas
and dust coalesced to form
the sun, light left the earliest
stars and began a long journey
through space.
The light has been travel-
ing ever since, covering tril-
lions upon trillions of miles. It
hurtled by galaxies and their
nascent stars, some of which
were accompanied by planets.
And on one of these, a species
evolved with the ability not
only to question what might
be out there, but to build tools
to see what its own eyes could
not.
On Monday, July 11, the
world got its first glimpse of
that ancient light courtesy of
NASA’s James Webb Space
Telescope, the most sophisti-
cated and ambitious deep-space
viewing tool yet assembled.
It’s a snapshot of deep space,
the light from innumera-
ble galaxies swirling around
a central point like the light
thrown off from a disco ball.
Flanked by President Joe
Biden and Vice President Ka-
mala Harris, NASA Adminis-
trator Bill Nelson unveiled the
image at a White House news
conference.
“If you held a grain of sand
on the tip of your finger at
arm’s length, that is the part of
the universe that you’re seeing
— just one little speck of the
universe,” Nelson said.
Webb is the successor to
the Hubble Space Telescope,
which transformed science’s
understanding of the vastness
of the universe. One of Hub-
ble’s most famous images, the
eXtreme Deep Field, shows
flecks of light representing
some 5,500 galaxies, the faint-
est of which enable us to look
back in time 13.2 billion years.
Webb allows astronomers
to zoom in on Hubble’s faint-
est flecks.
“It’s an emotional moment
when you see nature suddenly
releasing some of its secrets,”
said Thomas Zurbuchen, as-
sociate administrator for NA-
SA’s Science Mission Direc-
torate. “It’s not an image. It’s a
new worldview. You’re going
to see nature giving up secrets
that have been there for many,
many decades, centuries, mil-
lennia.”
Webb can, quite literally, see
galaxies far, far away as they
were long, long ago — just a
few hundred million years af-
ter the big bang. It intercepts
light in the infrared part of the
spectrum, whose wavelengths
are too long to be visible to the
human eye.
Built at Northrop Grum-
man’s Space Park in Redondo
Beach, California, Webb
launched on Christmas Day
from French Guiana. Its desti-
nation was L2, scientific short-
hand for the second LaGrange
point roughly 930,000 miles
from Earth. It’s one of five
places where the gravitational
forces of the sun and the Earth
are in balance, allowing Webb
to remain a fixed distance
from our planet.
It took nearly a month for
the telescope to get there.
Then the telescope slowly and
deliberately unfolded itself
over the course of two weeks.
An intricate system of
latches, cables and pins re-
leased a five-layer sunshield
about the size of a tennis
NASA images
This landscape of “mountains” and “valleys” speckled with glittering stars is actually the edge of a nearby, young, star-forming region called NGC 3324 in the Carina Nebula. Cap-
tured in infrared light by NASA’s new James Webb Space Telescope, this image reveals for the first time previously invisible areas of star birth.
Stephan’s Quintet, a visual grouping of five galaxies, is best known
for being prominently featured in the holiday classic film, “It’s a Won-
derful Life.” NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope reveals Stephan’s
Quintet in a new light.
court. Once that was in place
the telescope’s 18 hexagonal
mirrors swung into place,
creating a honeycomb-like
structure 21 feet across. The
process wouldn’t have seemed
out of place in an episode
of “Transformers.” (Indeed,
NASA released a short video
about Webb featuring Peter
Cullen, the actor who voiced
Optimus Prime in the original
1980s cartoon.)
Each mirror is coated in 100
nanometers of gold to enhance
its ability to reflect infrared
light. The mirrors were care-
fully aligned by focusing on a
star with the unwieldy name
2MASS J17554042+6551277.
The test image, released to the
public in March, showed a
brilliant star that appeared to
radiate light from six points, a
feature of the telescope’s hexag-
onal mirrors.
But the background caught
scientists’ attention: Behind
the star were countless flecks
of light, each representing a
galaxy billions of years old.
It was a tantalizing peek at
the telescope’s capabilities.
Hubble, launched in 1990,
has offered unprecedented in-
sight into the cosmos during
its decades of service. Its ob-
servations have helped sci-
entists determine the age of
the universe and the rate of
its expansion, along with dis-
covering black holes, obscure
moons and exoplanets.
But Webb is exponentially
more powerful. Its mirror is
six times larger than Hub-
ble’s, meaning it can collect far
more light and look farther
back in time. It also has far
greater capabilities to study in-
frared light.
Webb wouldn’t work if it
were where Hubble is. The
newer telescope is so much
more sensitive that it would
be overwhelmed by light and
heat from the Earth, moon
and sun. But its distance also
means that it’s too far away
to be repaired manually by
spacewalking astronauts, as
Hubble has been five times
since its launch.
Hubble had been in the sky
for less than a decade when
NASA began talking about the
technology that would eventu-
ally replace it. Construction of
the new telescope, named for
NASA’s second administrator,
began in 2004 with a $1 billion
budget and targeted launch
date of 2010.
But the budget and time-
line expanded nearly as fast as
the universe it was meant to
explore.
The team didn’t just have to
ensure the materials and tech-
nologies on the telescope would
work properly once shot into
space. In many cases, given
the pathbreaking nature of the
device, they also had to invent
those materials from scratch.
The segmented cryogenic
mirrors, the five-layer sun-
shield, the microshutters that
capture infrared light — all of
it had to first be imagined and
lab-tested before being man-
ufactured for use on the tele-
scope.
Its soaring costs ate into
budgets for NASA’s other proj-
ects. In 2011, Congress floated
a bill to kill the project entirely.
If a risk this big failed, “the
progress of astronomy could
be set back by a generation,”
the journal Nature warned in
a 2010.
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