James Webb Space Telescope Image: James Webb Space Telescope is a tennis court size observatory.
US President Joe Biden released the first full-color image being made public by NASA from the James Webb Space Telescope today.
Here are the top 5 points on this big story:
- The James Webb Space Telescope- world's largest and most powerful space telescope - was constructed by aerospace giant Northrop Grumman Corp and was launched to space for NASA and its European and Canadian counterparts in December 2021 from French Guiana.
- The telescope's primary mirror is an array of 18 hexagonal segments of gold-coated beryllium metal that helps it to observe objects at greater distances, thus further back in time, than the Hubble telescope.
- James Webb Space Telescope has five introductory targets including the new stars - the Carina Nebula and the Southern Ring Nebula, each thousands of light years away from Earth.
- The collection will also include two very different sets of galaxy clusters Stephan's Quintet- first identified in 1877 and a much more recent discovery dubbed SMACS 0723.
- NASA will also present the telescope's first spectrographic analysis of an exoplanet - one roughly half the mass of Jupiter that lies more than 1,100 light years away.
Advertisement
