NASA's Perseverance Mars rover is conducting its science campaign, taking samples at Jezero Crater's ancient river delta, but it's also been busy scouting. The rover is looking for locations where the planned Mars Sample Return (MSR) Campaign can land spacecraft and collect sample tubes Perseverance has filled with rock and sediment.

Lately, the hallways at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore have been filled with a few more smiles than usual.

Giddy excitement is in the air, anticipating the public release this week of the first significant, full-color images to come from the James Webb Space Telescope, said Susan Mullally, deputy project scientist for the telescope.

Staff at the institute, which operates the revolutionary telescope, have put the finishing touches on the public's first look at the power of Webb to observe what was once unobservable—distant galaxies, the atmospheres of faraway planets.

On Tuesday, the center on Johns Hopkins University's campus will open its doors to a host of scientists, journalists and other eager onlookers to unveil Webb's initial round of observations—ones curated by staffers to showcase the telescope's unique capabilities, with the goal of awing even the most uninspired.

NASA on Friday released a list of the objects captured for Webb's first set of images, including one of the brightest nebulae in the sky, a giant gaseous planet nearly 1,150 light-years from Earth and a quintet of galaxies "locked in a cosmic dance of repeated close encounters.