What a difference a year makes: The James Webb Space Telescope has provided new photos of the most distant planets in our solar system, refreshed our views on the universe with the sharpest infrared images of it yet and in its latest feat, shown us the star-forming region nearest to our home planet. NASA on Wednesday marked the cosmic instrument’s first year of discovery and scientific operations by releasing a new, detailed view of the Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex — the closest star-forming area to Earth — exactly one year after broadcasting the first images made using the space telescope. The $10 billion Webb Telescope was named after the man who led NASA’s Apollo program from 1961 to 1968 and it replaced its predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope, which launched into low Earth orbit in 1990. While Hubble captured the stars and our imaginations from approximately 332 miles away, the Webb telescope has spent the last year documenting space from a distance of almost one million miles from Earth. Among its most stunning imagery from the last year are luminous, 150-million pixel photos that were made using a Bay Area-built camera known as the NIRCam, or Near-Infrared Camera, which teams of researchers began developing in 2002. To make its pictures, Webb’s 18-paned mirror collects light from the sky and directs it to four instruments, including NIRCam, the main source of its visuals. Another instrument studies the composition of space material; a third guides and points the spacecraft. July 12, 2023: The region of the Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex shown in this photograph contains approximately 50 young stars. (NASA) June 25, 2023: The Webb Telescope, which is the world’s largest, most powerful space telescope, captured this photo of Saturn in June using the Bay Area-built Near-Infrared Camera. NASA attributed sunlight-absorbing methane gas in Saturn’s atmosphere for the planet’s dark appearance, in contrast to its bright, icy rings. (NASA) July 12, 2022: This composite photo of five galaxies known as Stephan’s Quintet contains over 150 million pixels large at full resolution and is constructed from 1,000 separate image files. (NASA) February 6, 2023: This representative-color image of Uranus, our solar system’s companion ice giant to Neptune, was the first taken by a space instrument the Voyager 2 spacecraft flew past it in 1986. The Keck Observatory in Hawaii also photographed it in 2000. (NASA) July 12, 2022: NASA compared this edge of a star-forming region known as NGC 3324 in the Carina Nebula to “craggy mountains on a moonlit evening” when it first published this NIRCam-captured photo. (NASA) September 21, 2022: This photo of Neptune was taken on July 12, 2022, the day NASA began publishing images made using the James Webb Space Telescope. Neptune had not been photographed by a space instrument since Voyager 2’s flyby in 1989. (NASA) July 11, 2022: Galaxy cluster SMACS 0723 as it appeared 4.6 billion years ago. (NASA)
First Anniversary of Webb Space Telescope Capturing Mesmerizing Cosmic Images
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