July 12, 2022, 01:39 ET
July 12, 2022, 13:39 ETS Security personnel at the Baltimore Space Telescope Science Institute watched the live broadcast of Webb’s presentation on Tuesday. Credit … Michael A. McCoy for The New York Times
On Tuesday morning, a new view of the Carina Nebula was released along with other new observations from the James Webb Space Telescope. But he made an earlier debut another Tuesday morning, this one in June, when a small team grabbing cups of coffee gathered for one of the many morning meetings to receive, process and package for public consumption what the last and best pair of eyes of humanity could see. after team members first signed confidentiality agreements to make sure there were no early leaks.
The task of this group was a mixture of science on the fly, public communication and brand management: to let everyone’s mind fly, to show policymakers what all these appropriations had paid for, and to assure the rest of the scientific world that yes, some of the most important in the universe. dodging secrets could finally be within reach.
The predecessor of the new telescope, which is still in operation, Hubble, had stressed the bet. Early Hubble images made it clear that his mirror was defective. But after successful repairs, scientists working at Hubble created protoviral photos of galaxies and nebulae like the “Pillars of Creation,” inspiring countless careers in the sciences. (My included: Before I became a science journalist, I spent two years as a data analyst for Hubble, which is also outside the Space Telescope Science Institute.)
But James Webb is another beast as a whole, so distinctive and advanced in his abilities that even veteran astronomers had no idea what to expect from the images he would give. Much of this is due to the fact that Webb operates at infrared wavelengths.
Simply displaying these things would require a different color palette and style. NASA wanted to start publishing the first images within six weeks after the telescope went online. And while looking at the abyss of the sublime cosmic for weeks would have its advantages, the cone of silence around the project could also prove lonely.
In early June, for example, Klaus Pontoppidan, the astronomer at the helm of this early launch team, was the first human to download the full “deep field” view of the new telescope.
“I sat there, staring at him for two hours, and then desperately and desperately eager to share it with someone,” he said. “But I couldn’t.”
In 2016, a committee met to begin choosing Webb’s first demonstration goals. In short, this process designated around 70 possible targets.
Once the telescope had started operating this winter, they reduced that list to regions of the sky to which they could aim within the six-week time limit, plus a few reserved ones, to find out in the coming months.
And then, finally, finally, the first results began to seep through Dr. Pontppidan’s computer bottleneck in early June. From there, the team digitally combined raw frames into deeper, polished exposures and then passed them to image processors for color reproduction.
“I felt overwhelmed,” said Joe Depasquale, the project’s main image processor, and described how it had felt to see a scene from another star-forming nebula come together, something with a more Carvaggio style, light and light. -shadow effect that was not included in the initial batch of releases. “This will blow people’s minds,” he said. (Confirmed.)
Will it land something as strong as the Apollo shots? Or the Hubble photos, plastered on the walls of science classrooms and imitated by everyone, from Terrence Malick to the “Thor” movies? See me. But for now, at least, the tap is open and the universe is pouring into it.
Correction:
July 12, 2022
Due to an editing error, an earlier version of this article misspelled the last name of a Webb telescope image processor. He is Joe Depasquale, not Despaquale.
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