Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Space
  3. News

James Webb Space Telescope has gone cold, but that’s good

Trevor Mogg
By

Almost four months after launch, the James Webb Space Telescope has just taken a big step toward making its first observations of deep space.

The $10 billion mission — a joint effort involving NASA, the European Space Agency, and the Canadian Space Agency — is on a quest to find out more about the origins of the universe while at the same time searching for distant planets that may support life.

Recommended Videos

This week the mission team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) confirmed that the Webb telescope had dropped to the required temperature to allow observation work to begin.

Related

A critical part of the telescope, the Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI), recently reached its final operating temperature below 7 kelvins (minus 447 degrees Fahrenheit, or minus 266 degrees Celsius).

JPL said that along with the telescope’s other other instruments, MIRI started cooling down in the shade of Webb’s large sunshield, dropping to around 90 kelvins (minus 298 F, or minus 183 C).

However, it said that dropping to less than 7 kelvins required an electrically powered “cryocooler” device to get it past the so-called “pinch point” when the instrument goes from 15 kelvins (minus 433 F, or minus 258 C) to 6.4 kelvins (minus 448 F, or minus 267 C).

“The MIRI cooler team has poured a lot of hard work into developing the procedure for the pinch point,” Analyn Schneider, project manager for MIRI, said on Wednesday. “The team was both excited and nervous going into the critical activity. In the end, it was a textbook execution of the procedure, and the cooler performance is even better than expected.”

The low temperature is vital as Webb’s instruments detect infrared light, which “distant galaxies, stars hidden in cocoons of dust, and planets outside our solar system” all emit.

Components on the Webb telescope, if too warm, would also emit infrared light, making it hard for scientists to understand the gathered data, so cooling them down solves this issue.

Cooling the telescope also suppresses something called “dark current,” an electric current created by the vibration of atoms in the Webb’s detectors that could also confuse the telescope as to where a light source is coming from.

“We spent years practicing for that moment, running through the commands and the checks that we did on MIRI,” said MIRI project scientist Mike Ressler. “It was kind of like a movie script: Everything we were supposed to do was written down and rehearsed. When the test data rolled in, I was ecstatic to see it looked exactly as expected and that we have a healthy instrument.”

The Webb team will now take test images of celestial objects in deep space to calibrate the telescope’s instruments and check that everything is working as it should. Assuming everything goes to plan, we should be seeing the first images from the project this summer.

The James Webb Telescope is the most powerful space-based observatory ever built and its work will complement that of the Hubble telescope that’s been exploring deep space for more than 30 years.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Trevor Mogg
Trevor Mogg
Contributing Editor
Not so many moons ago, Trevor moved from one tea-loving island nation that drives on the left (Britain) to another (Japan)…
James Webb observes merging stars creating heavy elements
This image from Webb’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) instrument highlights GRB 230307A’s kilonova and its former home galaxy among their local environment of other galaxies and foreground stars. The neutron stars were kicked out of their home galaxy and travelled the distance of about 120,000 light-years, approximately the diameter of the Milky Way galaxy, before finally merging several hundred million years later.

In its earliest stages, the universe was composed mostly of hydrogen and helium. All of the other, heavier elements that make up the universe around us today were created over time, and it is thought that they were created primarily within stars. Stars create heavy elements within them in the process of fusion, and when these stars reach the ends of their lives they may explode in supernovas, spreading these elements in the environment around them.

That's how heavier elements like those up to iron are created. But for the heaviest elements, the process is thought to be different. These are created not within stellar cores, but in extreme environments such as the merging of stars, when massive forces create exceedingly dense environments that forge new elements.

Read more
Researchers discover a 320-mph jet stream around Jupiter’s equator
This image of Jupiter from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) shows stunning details of the majestic planet in infrared light. In this image, brightness indicates high altitude. The numerous bright white "spots" and "streaks" are likely very high-altitude cloud tops of condensed convective storms. Auroras, appearing in red in this image, extend to higher altitudes above both the northern and southern poles of the planet. By contrast, dark ribbons north of the equatorial region have little cloud cover. In Webb’s images of Jupiter from July 2022, researchers recently discovered a narrow jet stream traveling 320 miles per hour (515 kilometers per hour) sitting over Jupiter’s equator above the main cloud decks.

The James Webb Space Telescope might be best known for its study of extremely distant galaxies, but it is also used for research on targets closer to home, like planets within our solar system. Last year, the telescope captured a stunning image of Jupiter as seen in the infrared wavelength, and now scientists who have been working on this data have published some of their findings about the planet -- including a brand-new feature that they identified in its atmosphere.

This image of Jupiter from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) shows stunning details of the majestic planet in infrared light. In Webb’s images of Jupiter from July 2022, researchers recently discovered a narrow jet stream traveling 320 miles per hour (515 kilometers per hour) sitting over Jupiter’s equator above the main cloud decks. NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Ricardo Hueso (UPV), Imke de Pater (UC Berkeley), Thierry Fouchet (Observatory of Paris), Leigh Fletcher (University of Leicester), Michael H. Wong (UC Berkeley), Joseph DePasquale (STScI)

Read more
James Webb captures a gorgeous stellar nursery in nearby dwarf galaxy
This new infrared image of NGC 346 from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) traces emission from cool gas and dust. In this image blue represents silicates and sooty chemical molecules known as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs. More diffuse red emission shines from warm dust heated by the brightest and most massive stars in the heart of the region. Bright patches and filaments mark areas with abundant numbers of protostars. This image includes 7.7-micron light shown in blue, 10 microns in cyan, 11.3 microns in green, 15 microns in yellow, and 21 microns in red (770W, 1000W, 1130W, 1500W, and 2100W filters, respectively).

A gorgeous new image from the James Webb Space Telescope shows a stunning sight from one of our galactic neighbors. The image shows a region of star formation called NGC 346, where new stars are being born. It's located in the Small Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy that is a satellite galaxy to the Milky Way.

The star-forming region of the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) was previously imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2005, but this new image gives a different view as it is taken in the infrared wavelength by Webb instead of the optical light wavelength used by Hubble.

Read more