![]() ![]() “I knew computationally that the diffraction was limited to a micron, that the full width at half maximum was whatever-I knew we’d have pretty pictures,” she said. Rieke was surprised by how moved she was by the beauty of the pictures. She said that the team started to term these incidental galaxies “photobombers.” “No matter where we’ve pointed J.W.S.T., even in the images taken during commissioning that would last a few tens of seconds, we kept getting these galaxies that we weren’t even looking for in the background,” Rieke said. ![]() The new image, which took less than a day to make, shows immensely more detail-and more galaxies. The Hubble telescope, which focussed on a similar patch of sky for two weeks, revealed thousands more galaxies than expected. The first one, called a deep-field image, is of a patch of sky that, from Earth, is about the equivalent of what would be occluded by a grain of sand-or a micrometeoroid-held out at arm’s length. Marcia Rieke had an opportunity to see the first images a few days before they were released, because she was asked to make a short presentation to help interpret them. “Now I feel like the young people who worked on this project-they have a bright future in astronomy,” Marcia said. There was always a possibility that the highly complex J.W.S.T. Marcia’s team looks at some of the shortest wavelengths that the telescope can perceive, while George’s team looks at some of the longest. scientist for another instrument, the MIRI. ![]() Rieke has served as the chief scientist for one of the telescope’s main instruments, the NIRCam her husband, George Rieke, has been the chief U.S. “I am beyond cloud nine,” the astrophysicist Marcia Rieke told me. The sharpness and clarity might make you think of Vermeer-what is being painted is light. The smudgy-pastel feel that previous telescopes delivered is not present. (Exoplanets are ones not in our solar system.) And they’re very, very pretty. These images carry news about the early universe, the birth and death of stars, the collision of galaxies, and the atmospheres of exoplanets. The level of detail has far surpassed expectations. On July 12th, the first five scientific images taken by the telescope were released to the public. But, of the three hundred and forty-four details that were once listed as things that could go wrong and destroy the whole mission, none has happened. Since its launch, arguably the roughest luck the James Webb Space Telescope has had is hitting a micrometeoroid the size of a grain of sand. The imaging operations center is based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.įor more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. Image scale is 60 kilometers (38 miles) per pixel. 3, 2007, at a distance of approximately 1.1 million kilometers (700,000 miles) from Saturn. The images were obtained with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Feb. Images taken using red, green and blue spectral filters were combined to create this natural-color view. The small moon Janus (181 kilometers, or 113 miles across) can be spotted off the planet's western limb (edge) near the image bottom. Here, Cassini looks upward at, and through, the sunlit side of the rings from about 19 degrees below the ring plane. With pastel blues, pinks, greens and golds, Saturn displays a dazzling diversity of colors and hues. ![]()
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