The image dazzles from a computer screen in the corner of the room: six beams of red-orange light bursting from a luminous Milky Way star.

But the most entrancing part of the picture—among the public's first dispatches from the revolutionary James Webb Space Telescope—lies in the background, where amorphous blobs are really swirling galaxies.

From a desk across the room in Baltimore's Space Telescope Science Institute, astronomical optics scientist Charles LaJoie zooms in, and even more cloudlike spirals appear, once concealed in the reaches of space.

For the scientists at the institute—the hub for all things Webb—the image is there as a reminder of what's to come. When all of Webb's 18 mirror segments are completely aligned, likely before the end of April, astronomers will be able to peer deeper into the cosmos than ever before.

To the astronomers in the room, seeing a background of galaxies from behind the world's most powerful telescope was anticipated. But for the engineers, focused for so long on building the telescope, it was a "wow moment," said Lee Feinberg, Webb's optical telescope element manager for over 20 years.

An atmospheric environment monitoring satellite was sent into space by the Long March-4C rocket lifting off from the Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center in Shanxi Province, north China early Saturday.

Five atmospheric environment monitoring payloads are carried on the satellite orbiting the Earth, three of which are developed by the Hefei Institutes of Physical Sciences (HFIPS) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, namely environmental Monitoring Instrument (EMI), Directional Polarization Camera (DPC) and Particle Observation scanning Polarization Meter (POSP), working independently or collectively to monitor the air pollutants at global scale.

With a maximum field of view of 2,600 kilometers, it can cover the entire earth in one day and has a minimum spectral resolution of 0.6 nanometer, enabling EMI to accurately identify unique information in the absorption spectra and then detect and monitor polluted gases such as nitrogen dioxide, sulfur dioxide and formaldehyde.

For DPC and POSP, researchers at HFIPS proposed an innovative detection program called "Crossfire," which combines the spatio-temporal distribution of global atmospheric aerosols and clouds obtained by DPC instrument and the high-precision atmospheric aerosol parameters obtained by the POSP instrument across orbit.