NASA’s new space telescope sees 1st starlight, captures selfie

NASA’s new space telescope has captured its first starlight and even captured a selfie of its giant, gold mirror. All the 18 segments of the primary mirror on James Webb Space are working fine for 11/2 months into the mission, the official revealed. The first target of the telescope was a bright star 258 light-years away in the constellation Ursa Major.

“That was just a real wow moment”, said Marshall Perrin of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore.

The $10 billion infrared observatory, the successor to the aging Hubble Space Telescope, will seek light from the first stars and galaxies that formed in the universe nearly 14 billion years ago. Additionally, it will also examine the atmospheres of alien worlds for any possible signs of life on other planets.

NASA did not detect any fault in Hubble’s mirror until after 1990 when it was launched; more than three years passed before spacewalking astronauts were able to fix the telescope’s blurry vision.

While everything is looking good so far with Webb, engineers should be able to rule out any major mirror flaws by next month, Feinberg said.

Webb’s 21-foot (6.5-meter), the gold-plated mirror is the largest ever launched into space. An infrared camera on the telescope snapped a picture of the mirror as one segment gazed upon the targeted star.

The reaction was pretty much ‘Holy Cow!’, Feinberg said.

NASA released the selfie, along with a mosaic of starlight from each of the mirror segments. The 18 points of starlight looked like bright fireflies flitting against a black night sky.

After 20 years with the project, it is just unbelievably satisfying to see everything working so well so far, said the University of Arizona’s Marcia Rieke, principal scientist for the infrared camera.

Webb took off from South America in December and reached its designated perch 1 million miles (1.6 million kilometers) away last month.