It's going to be absolutely incredible, assuming everything works as planned.
The entire telescope is going to be only a few dozen degrees above absolute zero. They're cooling the main image sensors to 40° K by means of active refrigeration. That will permit observation at amazingly long infrared wavelengths, out to 28 microns. A military-grade FLIR camera with cooled optics goes out to about 14 microns at most.
28 microns is the peak wavelength emitted by a black body at 105°K, or -270°F. This corresponds to extremely old, red-shifted light.
Would be great if the pic came back and it showed “I Did All This”
Help me out here (you are obviously very up-to-date on your Cosmology - at least in comparison to me).
The current black-body temperature (temperature inferred from the frequency of the cosmic background radiation) is 2.7 Kelvin (note the lack of a "degree" sign), yes? And it is dropping geometrically? So, when the universe was half as old, the temperature was 5.4 Kelvin? When it was a quarter of its current age, the temperature was 10.8 K, and so on.
So a temperature of 105 K would mean seeing light from a time when the universe was only about 2% of its present age, correct?
Regards,