The most powerful space telescope in history, NASA's James Webb, showed its first images of a star, which form a mosaic of 18 points of light because its main mirror, made up of as many hexagons, is not yet aligned or calibrated.
Webb pointed to HD 84406, a bright, isolated star in the constellation Ursa Major, which was chosen because it is easily identifiable and has no nearby bright stars, which helps reduce background clutter.
The observatory reached its final position on January 24, 1.5 million kilometers from Earth , and is now about to complete the first phase of a process that will take months, the alignment of the main mirror using the near infrared camera (NIRCam). The image captured by the telescope is a mosaic of 18 randomly arranged points of starlight that reflect light from the star on Webb's secondary mirror and NIRCam's detectors.
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What appears as a simple blurred image of starlight will form the basis for aligning and focusing the telescope so that in a few months "it can provide unprecedented views of the universe," reported the European Space Agency (ESA), which participates in this project. with the American NASA and the Canadian Space Agency.
Over the next month, the telescope team will gradually adjust the mirror segments until all 18 images become one. Among the images is a selfie of the James Webb's main mirror, which was taken not by an external camera, but by a specialized lens on the NIRCam instrument.
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"Webb's team is elated with how well the first steps in imaging and aligning the telescope are going. We were very happy to see light reaching NIRCam," said Marcia Rieke of the University of Arizona and principal investigator of the instrument. During the image collection process that began on February 2, Webb was redirected to 156 different positions around the star's predicted location and generated 1,560 images using NIRCam's ten detectors, in a process that took almost twenty-five hours.
The observatory was able to locate the star on each of its mirror segments, and these images were put together to produce a single large mosaic that captures the signature of each primary mirror segment in one frame.
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Each individual dot visible in the image mosaic is the same star captured by each segment of Webb's primary mirror, providing "a bounty of detail that engineers and optics experts will use to align the telescope," ESA added.
This activity determined the alignment positions of each segment after deployment, which is the essential first step for the observatory to obtain a functional alignment for its science operations. Webb's images will become clearer, more detailed and more complex as its instruments reach operating temperature and begin collecting data.
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