The mirror is so large that it had to be folded to fit inside the rocket for launch on December 25th. After reaching a million-mile orbit from Earth in January, Webb began a careful process of unfolding and aligning his mirror. The first high-resolution images Webb collects from the world are not expected until the end of June, as the observatory’s instruments have yet to be calibrated. But test results released by NASA on Thursday show clear, well-focused images that can capture the observatory’s four instruments. Together, these images share the full field of view of the telescope. Webb mirrors direct focused light from space onto each instrument, and these instruments capture images. For the test, Webb observed a small neighboring satellite galaxy called the Large Magellanic Cloud. The dense field of the galaxy with hundreds of thousands of stars can be seen in the test images. “These remarkable test images from a successfully aligned telescope show what people in countries and continents can achieve when there is a bold scientific vision for exploring the universe,” said Lee Feinberg, Webb’s telescope’s director at Goddard Space Flight. NASA. The team of telescopes expects the observatory to even surpass the goals it was intended to achieve, because it is already performing better than expected. “These images have radically changed the way I look at the universe,” Scott Acton, a wavefront scientist at Ball Aerospace, said in a statement. “We are surrounded by a creation agreement; there are galaxies everywhere! I hope everyone in the world can see them.” An earlier image released in March also showed that Webb could use individual parts of his mirror as a huge 21-foot, 4-inch (6.5-meter) mirror to capture light from a single star. For the next two months, the team will ensure that all scientific instruments are calibrated. Each instrument has a number of specialized detectors with custom equipment to assist in achieving Webb’s scientific goals, and all instruments must be configured to be ready. And this summer, we will see the first glimpses of the Webb that could unlock the mysteries of the universe.
