President Joe Biden on Monday will reveal the first image from NASA’s new space telescope — the deepest view of the cosmos ever captured.
The first image from the $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope is going to show the farthest humanity has ever seen in both time and distance, closer to the dawn of the universe and the edge of the cosmos. That image will be followed Tuesday by the release of four more galactic beauty shots from the telescope’s initial outward gazes.
NASA said Biden will show a “deep field” image. That shot is likely to be be filled with lots of stars, with massive galaxies in the foreground distorting the light of the objects behind, telescoping them and making faint and extremely distant galaxies visible.
The images to be released Tuesday include a view of a giant gaseous planet outside our solar system.
The world’s biggest and most powerful space telescope rocketed away last December from French Guiana in South America. It reached its lookout point 1 million miles (1.6 million kilometers) from Earth in January. Then the lengthy process began to align the mirrors, get the infrared detectors cold enough to operate and calibrate the science instruments, all protected by a sunshade the size of a tennis court that keeps the telescope cool.
Webb is considered the successor to the highly successful, but aging Hubble Space Telescope.
NASA is collaborating on Webb with the European and Canadian space agencies.
(AP)