NASA recently completed the final phase of the alignment of the James Webb Space Telescope, which means that the telescope can capture clear focus images with each of its four airborne scientific instruments. Since then, NASA has entered the commissioning stage of scientific instruments before its official operation this summer, but the agency spent some time this week carefully observing sample images from Weber's coldest instruments**
The mid infrared instrument (MIRI) has a camera and a spectrograph, which can see the light of the mid infrared spectrum. It covers a wavelength range of 5 to 28 microns.
The test images, taken at 7.7 microns, show part of the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small satellite galaxy in the Milky way. The contrast image of the same target was taken with the infrared array camera of NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope (at 8.0 microns). The telescope was launched in 2003 and completed scientific operation in January 2020.
People don't have to wait until this summer to learn more about the universe around the earth. On Thursday, the European Southern Observatory (ESO) and the event horizon telescope (EHT) project will hold a press conference to introduce the pioneering achievements of EHT. The meeting will be broadcast live on YouTube at 10 a.m. EST on Thursday, May 12.
Some people believe that the meeting may involve a supermassive black hole called Sagittarius A *, but the details will not be determined until later this week.