Based in part on these recordings, researchers expect that the telescope will achieve or even exceed its ambitious mission goals.

The American space agency – which built and maintains the telescope together with the European and Canadian space agencies – has just announced this. “More than 20 years ago, the James Webb team set out to build the most powerful space telescope ever and then devised a bold optical design to achieve its demanding mission objectives,” said NASA’s Thomas Zurbuchen. “Today we can say that that design is paying off.”

Work in progress

Those auspicious words ring out at a time when the telescope isn’t even operational yet; the Webb team is still working to align the 18 mirrors that make up the main mirror so that they will function together as one large mirror. It is a time consuming process that consists of several stages. And a very important stage has now been reached, according to NASA. For each of the 18 segments has been tuned so that they now – using James Webb’s main instrument aboard: the Near Infrared Camera – together deliver one image of a space object – for example a star.

Intake

And the telescope literally did that. “We aligned the telescope completely and then aimed it at a star,” said Ritva Keski-Kuha, a member of the Webb team. The result can be seen below and exceeds all expectations. “These are the highest-resolution infrared images ever captured from space,” said colleague Scott Acton.

In this photo, the star 2MASS JJ17554042+6551277 shines. And although the James Webb telescope focused on the star before taking this image, because the telescope is so sensitive, the galaxies and stars in the background can also be seen. Image: NASA/STScl.

“We’re really excited about what this means for science,” said Keski-Kuha. Because again, these images are just previews, made to check whether the mirrors are properly aligned. And if the telescope exceeds expectations at this stage, how much more can we expect from James Webb when it is fully operational? “We now know that we have built a good telescope.”

Future work

However, the first real images from that telescope, made with a view to the mission objectives, are still a long way off. Because there is still more work to be done first. In addition to the Near Infrared Camera there are also other scientific instruments on board James Webb, such as the Near-Infrared Spectrograph and the Mid-Infrared Instrument. The telescope will also have to be aligned in the coming weeks with a view to those instruments. The Webb team is expected to be ready with this by the beginning of May. It then takes another two months to prepare James Webb’s instruments for their operational phase. The first ‘real’ recordings are therefore not expected until the summer.

In the meantime, the Webb team can breathe a sigh of relief for now. After it was previously possible to get the very fragile and complex James Webb telescope into space and unfold it in one piece, it has now also been shown that the telescope is able to collect the light from (distant) objects in space and without further delay to deliver to the instruments that then have to make chocolate. And so the telescope does exactly what was expected of it. And that was – as NASA has repeatedly told us before and after launch – never for granted.

The James Webb telescope is the size of a tennis court and should radically change our view of the universe (and ourselves). Curious about what the telescope will be looking at and investigating? Read all about it here!