The James Webb Space Telescope has seen its first starlight and shared the image as well, while also sending a selfie of its primary mirror ahead of the long alignment process. Now that the craft has reached its destination, the team is now waiting for the components to cool down, letting them radiate heat in deep space. This passive cooling process will continue until the three near-infrared (NIR) instruments and the telescope itself attains a steady-state temperature, eventually reaching a thermal energy equilibrium.

NASA's ambitious space telescope, which is tasked with tracing the universe's origins, will perform its imaging duties. The team is currently hoping for the primary mirror to reach a temperature of -223 degrees Celsius. The NIR instruments need to dip even lower at -233 degrees Celsius, while the Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) will go all the way down to -266 degrees Celsius. The telescope's wavefront sensor called NIRCam was selected because it can operate at higher temperatures and offers a broader field of view. Currently, the NIRCam is also working far above its ideal temperature, resulting in artifacts in imagery.

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As the cooldown happens, the alignment process has begun, giving the world a glimpse of JWST's very first star sighting. The team at NASA started by selecting a star named HD 84406 that was bright enough and didn't have any other shiny celestial body nearby that could contaminate the image. For the ambitious space telescope to take the above picture, the team had to make 156 position adjustments around the predicted location of its target star. Since all the mirrors are not aligned, each segment acts as a separate telescope on its own. Once the target was locked and each part collected its share of optical data, it was combined to create a full shot.

So Far, So Good

James Webb Mirror Selfie
NASA

The final result was a collection of 1,560 images captured by the 10 Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam) detectors. And these were no regular JPEGs of a few megabytes in size. Instead, these 1,560 shots harbored 54GB of raw data and took nearly 25 hours to capture. Then, as is the case with most deep space visual data analyses, all the images were stitched together to create a panoramic mosaic in one single frame that packs over 2 billion pixels. The positive news here is that the Webb telescope's honeycomb segments were able to find the target object within the first six hours of the process, taking about 16 exposures to get things right.

As of now, scientists have identified and traced each white spot to the mirror segment that captured it. The next step is to arrange them all in the same order as the mirror placement, followed by focusing them. The team will then put all those images on top of each other to create a single shot of the star in its sights, a task that will begin soon. Interestingly, the telescope took a selfie of the primary mirror, which appears as a bright hexagonal spot in the monochrome photo above. But the selfie hasn't been taken merely for vanity purposes, as it also helps scientists get a better look at the alignment process and the general state of the components. The entire alignment process will last for about three months.

Next: How NASA's James Webb Telescope Will Find Habitable Worlds

Source: NASA