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Updated December 25th, 2022 at 19:59 IST

OTD in 2021: James Webb Space Telescope launches into Space; what did it achieve so far?

NASA and its international partners launched the James Webb Space Telescope on December 25, 2021 from the Kourou spaceport in French Guiana.

Reported by: Harsh Vardhan
James Webb Space Telescope
NASA | Image:self
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NASA and its international partners are celebrating the first anniversary of the James Webb Space Telescope’s launch which took place on December 25, 2021, from the Kourou spaceport in French Guiana. After years of discussion and review, the observatory's construction finally began in 2004, and agencies including NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) contributed to bringing it to life. 

Webb made it to the skies aboard Arianespace's Ariane 5 rocket which put the observatory into space so efficiently that its life span increased by a decade. Designed for 10 years, NASA revealed that Webb's fuel will now last as many as 20 years because it used less fuel than expected during its course correction while on the journey to the second Lagrange point (L2). This location is 15 lakh kilometres away from Earth and it was chosen because of its gravitational stability and fuel efficiency. Moreover, Webb is designed to observe the universe in infrared light, a wavelength that is not visible to the human eye but can be felt as heat, and because installing it in space would not hinder its observation as the Earth's atmosphere would have.

After the $10 billion observatory reached its destination, it underwent the crucial commissioning phase until June 2022 when the mission teams calibrated its instruments and aligned its mirrors. As we enter the first year of Webb's existence, let us dive into some of the crucial discoveries Webb has made so far.

Discovering water in an exoplanet

In the first data set released by NASA on July 12, it revealed that Webb has detected signs of water and clouds on an exoplanet named WASP-96b for the first time ever. This planet lies roughly 1,150 light-years away and is located in the southern-sky constellation named Pheonix and is a hot, puffy gas giant orbiting a sun-like star. Webb was able to discover the water signatures using its spectrographs which break light into spectra, basically like a bar-code and this bar-code has information about the molecules in the exoplanet's atmosphere.

First evidence of carbon dioxide in an exoplanet

Webb clocked in another first with the detection of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of WASP-39B, another planet outside our solar system. Located 700 light-years away, this exoplanet is also a hot gas giant which is nearly as massive as Saturn but is 1.3 times bigger than Jupiter. While evidence of elements such as sodium, potassium and water vapour have been previously discovered by telescopes such as Hubble and the retired Spitzer, this was the first instance of CO2 discovery in the planet's atmosphere. 

Peering deepest into the universe

Webb broke the internet with this picture of a galaxy cluster named SMACS 0723 which features hundreds of galaxies, many as old as the universe itself. NASA revealed that this image was produced when Webb scanned a sky area the size of a sand grain held at arm's length, something which showcases its ability to observe the universe. As mentioned above, the telescope observes the universe in infrared, the wavelength of light which can travel unimaginable distances. It is with this quality of Webb that it was able to photograph some of the galaxies from where light emerged over 12 billion years ago, just a little later than when the universe was born (approximately 13.8 billion years ago).

Photographing our solar system

Although Webb is designed to observe objects overwhelmingly far away from Earth, it managed to capture riveting pictures of planets in our solar system. It photographed Jupiter and Neptune in different infrared wavelengths of light (near-infrared and mid-infrared) and even spotted rings around these planets, which are believed to not have any rings. With Neptune, it provided the clearest view of its rings in over 30 years. The pictures of Jupiter and Saturn have different colours because the telescope first captures the light and scientists assign them different colours based on their wavelength. 

The first evidence of photo-chemistry on an exoplanet

On November 22, NASA announced that Webb has gathered the first evidence of photochemistry in a far-away world, confirmed the presence of broken clouds, and discovered a few clues into how this planet might have formed. The planet in the spotlight is the WASP-39b, where Webb first found evidence of carbon dioxide. Again, Webb broke light beams into spectra like a 'barcode' and studies the information about atoms and molecules stored in them. More about it here. To access more pictures by Webb, click here

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Published December 25th, 2022 at 16:53 IST

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