NASA has revealed the first images taken by the James Webb Space Telescope.
The telescope is out on a deep space mission and will be looking for signs of life in the universe.
2
2
The US space agency tweeted a selfie that the telescope took and a blurry image of stars.
Nasa warned that the first images would be blurry but we can expect great things to come.
It’s the world’s largest and most powerful space telescope and it cost around $10billion (£7.3billion).
The telescope is now fully deployed, which means it’s finally unfurled its huge mirrors and the sun-shield that will help it look for signs of life in the universe.
The telescope is essentially a massive mirror that can use infrared to see way beyond what we’ve seen before.
Nasa said in a statement: “The James Webb Space Telescope is nearing completion of the first phase of the months-long process of aligning the observatory’s primary mirror using the Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam) instrument.
Most read in Tech
“The team’s challenge was twofold: confirm that NIRCam was ready to collect light from celestial objects, and then identify starlight from the same star in each of the 18 primary mirror segments.
“The result is an image mosaic of 18 randomly organized dots of starlight, the product of Webb’s unaligned mirror segments all reflecting light from the same star back at Webb’s secondary mirror and into NIRCam’s detectors.”
Nasa said that although the first image just looks like blurry starlight, we can expect “unprecedented views of the universe this summer”.
The team behind the telescope now needs to adjust it so that it can get the perfect shots.
Marcia Rieke, principal investigator for the NIRCam instrument, said: “The entire Webb team is ecstatic at how well the first steps of taking images and aligning the telescope are proceeding.
“We were so happy to see that light makes its way into NIRCam.”
More to follow…
For the latest news on this story keep checking back at Sun Online.
The-sun.com is your go-to destination for the best celebrity news, sport news, real-life stories, jaw-dropping pictures and must-see video.
Like us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/TheSunUS and follow us from our main Twitter account at @TheUSSun.
