NASA said Friday the first cosmic images from the James Webb Space Telescope will include unprecedented views of distant galaxies, bright nebulae, and a faraway giant gas planet.

The US, European and Canadian space agencies are gearing up for a big reveal on July 12 of early observations by the $10 billion observatory, the successor to Hubble that is set to reveal new insights into the origins of the universe.

"I'm looking very much forward to not having to keep these secrets anymore, that will be a great relief," Klaus Pontoppidan, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STSI) that oversees Webb, told AFP last week.

An international committee decided the first wave of full-color scientific images would include the Carina Nebula, an enormous cloud of dust and gas 7,600 light years away, as well as the Southern Ring Nebula, which surrounds a dying star 2,000 light years away.

Carina Nebula is famous for its towering pillars that include "Mystic Mountain," a three-light-year-tall cosmic pinnacle captured in an iconic image by Hubble.

Webb has also carried out a spectroscopy -- an analysis of light that reveals detailed information -- on a faraway gas giant called WASP-96 b, which was discovered in 2014.

Nearly 1,150 light-years from Earth, WASP-96 b is about half the mass of Jupiter and zips around its star in just 3.4 days.

Next comes Stephan's Quintet, a compact galaxy 290 million light years away. Four of the five galaxies within the quintet are "locked in a cosmic dance of repeated close encounters," NASA said.

Finally, and perhaps most enticing of all, Webb has gathered an image using foreground galaxy clusters called SMACS 0723 as a kind of cosmic magnifying glass for the extremely distant and faint galaxies behind it.

This is known as "gravitational lensing" and uses the mass of foreground galaxies to bend the light of objects behind them, much like a pair of glasses.

Dan Coe, an astronomer at STSI, told AFP on Friday that even in its first images, the telescope had broken scientific ground.

"When I first saw the images... of this deep field of this galaxy cluster lensing, I looked at the images, and I suddenly learned three things about the universe that I didn't know before," he said.

"It's totally blown my mind."

Webb's infrared capabilities allow it to see deeper back in time to the Big Bang, which happened 13.8 billion years ago, than any instrument before it.

Because the Universe is expanding, light from the earliest stars shifts from the ultraviolet and visible wavelengths it was emitted in, to longer infrared wavelengths -- which Webb is equipped to detect at an unprecedented resolution.

The James Webb Space Telescope, by the numbers
Washington (AFP) July 11, 2022 - The most powerful space telescope ever built, James Webb is set to deliver its first full-color scientific images to the world Tuesday.

Here is an overview of this feat of human ingenuity, in five key figures.

- More than 21 feet -

The centerpiece of the observatory is its huge main mirror, measuring more than 21 feet (6.5 meters) in diameter and made up of 18 smaller, hexagonal-shaped mirrors.

The observatory also has four scientific instruments: cameras to take pictures of the cosmos, and spectrographs, which break down light to study which elements and molecules make up objects.

The mirror and the instruments are protected from the light of our Sun by a tennis-court sized thermal shield, made up of five superimposed layers.

Each layer is hair thin, and together they ensure the telescope operates in the darkness needed to capture faint glimmers from the far reaches of the Universe.

- Million miles away -

Unlike the Hubble telescope which revolves around the Earth, Webb orbits around the Sun, nearly a million miles (1.6 million kilometers) from us, or four times the distance from our planet to the Moon.

It took the spacecraft almost a month to reach this region, called Lagrange Point two, where it remains in a fixed position behind the Earth and Sun to give it a clear view of the cosmos.

Here, the gravity from the sun and Earth balance the centrifugal motion of a satellite, meaning it needs minimal fuel for course correction.

- 13.8 billion years -

In astronomy, the farther out you see, the deeper back in time you're looking.

Webb's infrared capabilities are what make it uniquely powerful -- allowing it to detect light from the earliest stars, which has been stretched into infrared wavelengths as the Universe expanded.

This lets it peer further back in time than any previous telescope, to within a few hundred million years after the Big Bang, 13.8 billion years ago.

- Three-decade wait -

The project was first conceived in the 1990s, but construction did not begin until 2004.

Then Webb's launch date was repeatedly postponed. Initially set for 2007, it finally took place on December 25, 2021, aboard an Ariane 5 rocket, from French Guiana.

- $10 billion -

Webb is an international collaboration between US space agency NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA), and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA), involving more than 10,000 people.

The lifetime cost to NASA alone will be approximately $9.7 billion, according to an analysis by the Planetary Society, or $10.8 billion adjusted for inflation to 2020 dollars.

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NASA releases James Webb telescope 'teaser' picture
Washington (AFP) July 7, 2022
NASA has a provided a tantalizing teaser photo ahead of the highly-anticipated release next week of the first deep-space images from the James Webb Telescope - an instrument so powerful it can peer back into the origins of the universe. The $10 billion observatory - launched in December last year and now orbiting the Sun a million miles (1.5 million kilometers) away from Earth - can look where no telescope has looked before thanks to its enormous primary mirror and instruments that focus on infra ... read more

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