NASA’s ‘most expensive and powerful’ telescope takes first ever pics – ‘Pinnacle moment’

Nasa's 'James Webb Space Telescope' launches into orbit

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The telescope, described as the “world’s most expensive and powerful” of its kind, was launched last Christmas Day and reached its final destination Lagrange 2 two weeks ago, a point in space a million miles away from Earth. NASA has now released the first image taken by the £7.4 billion machine, showing 18 white dots which are all snapshots of a distant star.

However the telescope is still not fully operational.

It needs to align its 18 gold-plated panels which have each taken a picture of the distant star, hence why the image is showing as 18 individual dots.

The next month will be spent getting the telescope at full power, so that the mirrors are working together and will be able to take a complete picture of the star.

Michael McElwain is a Webb observatory project scientist at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Centre in Maryland, USA.

He said: “Launching Webb to space was of course an exciting event, but for scientists and optical engineers this is a pinnacle moment, when light from a star is successfully making its way through the system down onto a detector.”

The James Webb telescope is designed to work at extremely cold temperatures and has still not yet cooled to its desired temperature of -223C.

The groundbreaking photo was taken by NIRCam, the only telescope device that can operate without having to get so cold.

The telescope is set to investigate the early universe, work out how fast the universe is expanding and analyse all sorts of space objects and galaxies.

It was originally set to be launched way back in 2007, with the original idea first being conceived in 1996.

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A major redesign in 2005 led to its launch date being dramatically pushed back, with the telescope finally being completed in 2016.

Like so many events of the past two years, the launch was delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Its first science images are expected to be captured in May, but they will need some processing before they can be released to the public in June.

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