Wednesday, July 12, 2023

Has it actually been a year already?

It seems like yesterday watching the meticulous work of the creators and engineers, correcting any "oops," and then launching the work of perfection into space with prolonged anticipation for deployment. It is so hard to believe a year has passed. 


The scientists need a news conference on these anniversaries to allow everyone to understand what we have learned by harnessing perfection.


The first anniversary image from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope displays the Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex, the closest star-forming region to Earth. 

July 12, 2023
By Joel Achenbach

The James Webb Space Telescope (click here) was designed to tunnel deeper into space and farther back in time than any previous observatory, with the audacious goal of seeing the very first galaxies that lit up the young universe. Creating pretty pictures was always a pleasant but ancillary feature of having this amazing new piece of hardware out in space.

Today, 365 days after NASA unveiled the mission’s first batch of data and images, it’s clear that the JWST can produce the hard science and the beauty shots with equal aplomb. NASA is marking the first anniversary of the JWST’s scientific debut with the release of a new image, demonstrating the telescope’s ability to re-envision the universe. The dramatic, somewhat hallucinatory image captures the dynamism of the Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex, the closest star-forming region to Earth, where planetary systems like our own could be in the initial stages of forming....