7/28/2023 0 Comments New telescope![]() ![]() With JWST, a single master pipeline developed by STScI takes images and data from all its instruments and makes them science-ready. “The goal was to enable science to be done much more quickly.” The incredible image resulting from those efforts revealed 10,000 galaxies stretching across the universe, in what came to be known as the Hubble Ultra Deep Field. “There was no way you could expect the community at that time to combine 800 exposures on their own,” says Anton Koekemoer, a research astronomer at STScI. Instead, they developed a pipeline to turn the exposures into a usable image, a taxing technical challenge given that each image required its own calibration and alignment. Other data is handed to scientists on programs that have proprietary windows, enabling them to take time analyzing their own data before it is released to the masses. Some of this is released immediately on public servers, where it is picked up by eager scientists or even by Twitter bots such as the JWST Photo Bot. Known as a “pipeline,” it turns the telescope’s raw images and numbers into useful information. The data, which contains images and spectroscopic signatures (essentially light broken apart into its elements), is fed through an algorithm run by STScI. The result of this packed schedule is that every day, JWST can collect more than 50 gigabytes of data, compared with just one or two gigabytes for Hubble. “The goal is always to minimize the amount of time we’re not doing science,” says Adler. Onboard thrusters and reaction wheels, which spin to change the orientation, move the telescope with precision between various targets across the sky. “It’s not a cheap thing.” In the 1990s, Hubble would occasionally find itself twiddling its thumbs in space if programs were altered or canceled JWST’s schedule is deliberately oversubscribed to prevent such issues. “The worst thing we could do is have an idle telescope,” says Dave Adler at STScI, the head of long-range planning for JWST. The aim is to keep the telescope as busy as possible. Every week, a team plans out the telescope’s upcoming observations, pulling from a long-term schedule of hundreds of approved programs to be run in its first year of science, from July 2022 to June 2023. JWST is hard at work, its activities carefully choreographed by the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore. ![]() The aim is to keep the telescope as busy as possible: “The worst thing we could do is have an idle telescope.”īut by now, the delays, the budget overruns, and most of the tensions have been overcome. “It’s just as powerful as we had hoped, if not more so,” says Gabriel Brammer, an astronomer at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark. Almost immediately after it started full operations in July of 2022, incredible vistas from across the universe poured down, from images of remote galaxies at the dawn of time to amazing landscapes of nebulae, the dust-filled birthplaces of stars. JWST, a NASA-led collaboration between the US, Canada, and Europe, is the most powerful space telescope in history and can view objects 100 times fainter than what the Hubble Space Telescope can see. “The minute we looked, the carbon dioxide feature was just beautifully drawn out.” “That was a very exciting moment,” says Batalha, whose group had gathered to glimpse the data for the first time. And it came just a few days into the lifetime of JWST. But the discovery could well herald more exciting detections-from more temperate worlds-in the future. WASP-39b, which takes just four Earth days to orbit its star, is too hot to be considered habitable. On Earth, carbon dioxide is a key indicator of plant and animal life. But in mid-July, when Batalha and her team got their hands on the first JWST observations of the distant world, they saw a clear signature of a gas that is common on Earth but had never been spotted before in the atmosphere of an exoplanet: carbon dioxide. Among the targets was WASP-39b, a scorching world that orbits a star some 700 light-years from Earth. ![]()
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