James Webb arrived on January 24 at what is already his new home: the Lagrange point L2 located approximately 1.5 million kilometers from Earth. There are still many months before the most powerful telescope ever created by man begins to send us information and images that will leave us speechless, but in the meantime, a ground-based observatory has managed to capture what is the first image of the telescope going towards its destination. .
The image has been taken from a ground-based telescope, the Rome-based Virtual Telescope Project , which tracked Webb through space and found it in the constellation Ursa Major.
“Our robotic telescope tracked the apparent motion of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which is marked by an arrow in the center. At the time of taking the images, JWST was about 1.4 million kilometers from us and had just reached its final destination, the L2 (2º) Lagrange point of the Earth-Sun system”, comments the project director. , Gianluca Masi.
Although it is not possible to see the telescope with the naked eye, if you know where to look, there is a good chance you can see it with binoculars . “It’s close to the bowl of Ursa Major,” said Lee Feinberg, element manager for the Webb Optical Telescope at NASA Goddard.
Looking back at the dawn of the universe
James Webb has an ambitious mission to study the early universe, determine how fast it is expanding, and analyze objects throughout the cosmos, from galaxies to exoplanets.
The telescope now needs about three months to ensure that each segment of the huge 6.5-meter mirror is in the right position. After this, the tests, calibrations of the instruments and cooling of the observatory in general will begin before operating normally.
Webb is about 100 times more powerful than Hubble, allowing it to observe objects at greater distances, thus further back in time than Hubble or any other telescope to date.
The JWST project, which began in 1996, is an international collaboration led by NASA in partnership with the European and Canadian space agencies.
