First image of James Webb Telescope after it reached its orbit nearly 15,00,000 km from Earth
Categories: US Education News
With the James Webb Telescope now successfully parked in its orbit at the second Lagrange point (L2), nearly 15,00,000 kilometres from Earth, the first images of the spacecraft have been captured from the planet. The Virtual Telescope Project 2.0 in Rome has captured the first image of the spacecraft as it orbits at L2 covering a month-long journey from Earth. The image was captured from a single 300-second exposure, unfiltered, remotely collected by a robotic unit at the Virtual Telescope Project. "Our robotic telescope tracked the apparent motion of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which is marked by an arrow in the centre," the project team said while releasing the image. With the telescope now entering its five-month-long commissioning phase, Amber Straughn, the deputy project scientist for Webb science communications, during a webcast Webb event said "We expect the first science images from JWST to come back in about five months." The telescope will enable astronomers to peer back further in time than ever before, all the way back to when the first stars and galaxies were forming 13.7 billion years ago. That’s a mere 100 million years from the Big Bang when the universe was created. Keith Parrish, a manager on the project said, “Webb is officially on the station. This is just capping off just a remarkable 30 days.” At 1.5 million kilometres away, Webb is more than four times as distant as the moon. The Webb is expected to operate for well over a decade, maybe two.