According to NASA Administrator Bill Nelson, the fully operational James Webb Space Telescope will enable NASA to show the "deepest image of our Universe" on July 12. Yes, you read that right. Thanks to the newly operational James Webb Space Telescope.
"If you think about that, this is farther than humanity has ever looked before," Nelson said during a press briefing at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, the operations centre for the $10 billion observatories that was launched in December last year and is now orbiting the Sun a million miles (1.5 million kilometres) away from Earth.
While all experts maintain that the first image will supersede expectations and go beyond the visual range of the Hubble space telescope, this will be "the deepest image of our universe that has ever been taken." NASA administrator Bill Nelson has said that we will soon get to see the capabilities of this telescope.
Launched with the aim of seeing the birth of our universe and the situation moments after the Big Bang. "It's going to explore objects in the solar system and atmospheres of exoplanets orbiting other stars, giving us clues as to whether potentially their atmospheres are similar to our own," added Nelson, speaking via phone while isolating with COVID.
"It may answer some questions that we have: Where do we come from? What more is out there? Who are we? And of course, it's going to answer some questions that we don't even know what the questions are."
The telescope, which has taken 20 years to build, will be looking back to the period of time just after the Big Bang in order to unravel some of the mysteries of how we got here. 'We're in the middle of getting history-making data,' Nelson added.
Thanks to its infrared capabilities, Webb can see farther back in time to the Big Bang, which took place 13.8 billion years ago. The light from the first stars moves from the shorter ultraviolet and visible wavelengths into the longer infrared wavelengths as the universe expands, which Webb is able to detect with an unmatched resolution. The earliest cosmic observations to date have been made within 330 million years of the Big Bang, but scientists anticipate easily breaking this record given Webb's capabilities.