James Webb Telescope's first full-color photos are coming
The first images from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope will be released July 12 and the initial batch will include the deepest view of the universe yet taken.
The first images from NASA's next-generation James Webb Space Telescope are set to be released next month and will include the deepest view of the universe ever taken, agency officials confirmed Wednesday.
NASA and its partners, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency, will unveil the initial batch of full-color images from the Webb telescope in a much-anticipated event on July 12. The $10 billion observatory is humanity's largest and most powerful space telescope, and experts have said it could revolutionize our understanding of the cosmos.
Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA's Science Mission Directorate, said that seeing the first images from the Webb telescope will be an emotional milestone for humanity — a moment he described as witnessing nature "giving up secrets that have been there for many, many decades, centuries, millennia."
"It's not an image. It's a new worldview," Zurbuchen said Wednesday in a news briefing.
The release will be streamed live by NASA at 10:30am EDT. In addition to the deepest infrared view yet captured of the universe, NASA officials said they will release the Webb telescope's first spectrum of an exoplanet, showing light emitted at different wavelengths from a planet in another star system. These images could offer new insights into the atmospheres and chemical makeup of other exoplanets in the cosmos.
Rating: 5