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Webb’s image covers a patch of sky approximately the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length by someone on the ground – and reveals thousands of galaxies in a tiny sliver of vast universe...

https://twitter.com/DJSnM/status/1546623692683087872/photo/1

NASA has a provided a tantalizing teaser photo ahead of the highly-anticipated release next week of the first deep-space images from the James Webb Telescope – an instrument so powerful it can peer back into the origins of the Universe. An engineering test image. (NASA, CSA, and FGS team) The US$10 billion observatory – launched in December last year and now orbiting the Sun a million miles (1.5 million kilometers) away from Earth – can look where no telescope has looked before thanks to its enormous primary mirror and instruments that focus on infrared, allowing it to peer through dust...

Industrial-scale agriculture has changed the make up of our atmosphere. So "exofarms" ought to be visible on Earth-like planets orbiting other stars. One of the key developments separating modern civilization from the hunter gatherer societies of the past is the invention of farming, which took place about 10,000 years ago. This began with the cultivation of wild plants and the domestication of various animals for dairy products and meat. The big advantage of farming is that it sustains a much larger population than hunting and gathering. This led to the emergence of cities, the sharing of natural resources and of...

NASA reported this week that a small meteoroid struck the telescope sometime between May 23-25. The object smacked one of the primary mirror segments, which will cause NASA to realign the mirror to reduce distortion caused by the impact. The space agency said it anticipated the telescope would be bombarded with dust-sized particles, and the strike was larger than anticipated. NASA said that the telescope’s beginning-of-life performance is still well above expectations, and the observatory is fully capable of performing the science it was designed to achieve.

Webb MIRI and Spitzer Comparison Image Comparison of a Webb Space Telescope Mid-Infrared Instrument image of the Large Magellanic Cloud and a past image of the same view using the Spitzer Space Telescope Infrared Array Camera. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech (left), NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI (right) ************************************************************************ NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope is aligned across all four of its science instruments, as seen in a previous engineering image showing the observatory’s full field of view. Now, we take a closer look at that same image, focusing on Webb’s coldest instrument: the Mid-Infrared Instrument, or MIRI. The MIRI test image (at 7.7 microns) shows part of...

James Webb Space Telescope Primary Mirror in Space Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center 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. 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...

HD 84406 is located in the constellation Ursa Major, which means "Big Bear" in Latin. The Big Dipper asterism (or star pattern) is actually part of this constellation, and it's the tail of this furry beast. The star has a visual magnitude of about 6.9, which is too dim to see with the naked eye. To see the star, you'll need a telescope or high-power binoculars. Here's our guide for the best telescopes for 2022, and our guide for the best binoculars may help you find the right pair to hunt Webb's star. A bright point like HD 84406 provides...

NASA The James Webb Space Telescope has fired its thrusters and reached its orbital destination around a million miles (1.5 million kilometers) away from our planet, NASA said Monday, a key milestone on its mission to study cosmic history. At around 2:00 pm Eastern Time (1900 GMT), the observatory fired its thrusters for 5 minutes in order to reach the so-called second Lagrange point, or L2, where it will have access to nearly half the sky at any given moment. "Webb, welcome home!" said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson in a statement. "We're one step closer to uncovering the mysteries...

At 11:30 AM (PST) - 62,500 miles from L2 - 836,000 miles from Earth - Current speed 555 mph - Speed will decline to about 325 mph before it enters L2 orbit in five days - Temperature of "hot" side has been stable since sun shield deployment, 133F and 50F - Cold side shows modest cooling, minus 340F and minus 330F - When operational, the cold side will be minus 388F - Webb actually has heaters to keep temp loss very slow to protect equipment and to avoid ice forming from any Earth moisture - Currently, Webb is retracting pegs...

JWST is now less than 100K miles from it's L2 destination. Its current speed is 0.1731 miles per second, or about 623 mph. This speed is slowly decreasing as it approaches its equilibrium distance from Earth. It will take another eight days to close the remaining distance to its destination; the first 798,000 miles has been traveled in 21 days, 15 hours. JWST cold side is at -200°C, only 73° above absolute zero.

Webb’s new delay epitomizes the systemic incompetence of Washington. Despite being 13 years behind schedule and costing eight times more than originally planned, NASA and its contractors still couldn’t get things right....

Explanation: Move over Hubble -- here comes the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). JWST promises to be the new most powerful telescope in space. In the last month, the 18-segment gold-plated primary mirror for JWST was unveiled. In the featured time-lapse video taken last week, the 6.5-meter diameter mirror was raised to a vertical position. The dramatic 30-second sequence shows NASA engineers monitoring the test as room lights glint brightly off the mirror's highly reflective surface. The beryllium mirrors have been coated with a thin film of gold to make them more reflective to infrared light. The science goals of...

NASA's next-generation space observatory promises to open new windows on the Universe — but its cost could close many more.It has to work — for astronomers, there is no plan B. NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), scheduled to launch in 2014, is the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope and the key to almost every big question that astronomers hope to answer in the coming decades. Its promised ability to peer back through space and time to the formation of the first galaxies made it the top priority in the 2001 astronomy and astrophysics decadal survey, one of a...