The countdown for NASA to show us the first images captured by James Webb is coming to an end. except imponderables, Next Tuesday, July 12, we will be able to see, for the first time, the final result of a project born last century, and that after multiple delays and cost increases, finally began its journey to the cosmos last Christmas. A milestone that many of us celebrate with great joy, but with a lot of work still ahead.
Since its arrival at the Lagrange point L2, the James Webb has dedicated these months to the deployment and commissioning of its mirrors and systems, a wide set of procedures of maximum precision, essential to guarantee that the telescope works correctly and that the deployment of the mirrors has been adequate, to avoid errors, distortions, etc. And during these processes, the James Webb has sent some control images, like the ones we could see last March.
Once the telescope is fully operational, it will not send all the images it captures back to Earth. Some of them are used, internally by James Webb himself, for their operation.. Thus, they are not sent to our planet because it is unnecessary and the bandwidth is limited, so it will be dedicated to transmitting the images necessary for scientific projects that rely on telescope observations.
However, with the first images still a few days away and the James Webb starting to work non-stop, the team realized they had a bit of bandwidth to spare, so they decided collect FGS images (Fine Guidance Sensor), a fundamental component of the guidance system, to observe the views of the telescope through an instrument necessary for its navigation.
The image, shared by NASA, is actually a composition from 72 shots captured by the FGS over 32 hours, and what we see in it are some stars in the foreground and a sea of bright galaxies in the background. And I don’t know about your case, but for me, observing all those points in the background, and thinking that each one of them is a galaxy, is fascinating to me at the same time and causes me a sensation that is difficult to describe, but that I can summarize in two points: How small we are, and how absurd it would be if there were no other life than ours, don’t you think?
