On March 16th, the $9 billion James Webb telescope sent a test infrared image from its current orbit 930,000 miles from Earth.
The simple image, focused on a single, brilliant star, represented the culmination of decades of planning, a dangerous and unpredictable launch, and months of painstaking calibration.
Even this simple test image hints of why the Webb telescope has the astronomy community so excited: in the background you can make out what are clearly distant galaxies.
Dr. Kenneth Sembach joins today to discuss his work as the Director of NASA’s Space Telescope Science Institute, which oversees the James Webb mission.
Dr. Sembach received his doctorate in astronomy from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and won the Newton Lacy Pierce Prize in astronomy in 2001.
Image Courtesy: Aldebaran S / UNSPLASH
