James Webb Space Telescope stamp release date revealed

By Trevor Mogg Published July 27, 2022

The James Webb Space Telescope Forever stamp. — USPS

The excitement surrounding the James Webb Space Telescope ramped up a notch earlier this month when NASA shared the first incredible images from the next-generation observatory.

Recommended Videos

Now the United States Postal Service (USPS) is getting in on the action with the imminent launch of a specially designed stamp to celebrate what is the most powerful space telescope ever built.

After announcing the stamp earlier this year, the USPS this week revealed the pre-order date for the new James Webb Space Telescope Forever stamp: August 8. Fans of stamps or space (or both!) simply need to visit the USPS’s online store to place their order.

A month later, on September 8, the stamp will go on general sale.

The image on the stamp features an artist’s digitally created depiction of the telescope set against what the USPS described as “a dazzling starscape.”

It was designed by art director Derry Noyes using existing art created by James Vaughan and an image from NASA and the Space Telescope Science Institute. The design shows the telescope’s 18 gold-coated segments, which together create the observatory’s stunning 21-foot mirror lens.

The image of a star (below) displayed at the top of a sheet of the stamps was captured by the Webb telescope during a test phase early on in the mission.

Stamps showing the James Webb Space Telescope. — USPS

After launching from U.S. soil in December 2021, the James Webb Space Telescope is now in a solar orbit about a million miles from Earth.

The cutting-edge technology aboard the telescope enables it to peer deeper into space than any telescope that has gone before, with the gathered data expected to help scientists learn more about the origins of the universe, while also pinpointing planets similar to Earth that could harbor life.

Topics

Tech News

Contributing Editor

Not so many moons ago, Trevor moved from one tea-loving island nation that drives on the left (Britain) to another (Japan)…

Space

James Webb captures gorgeous image of a Cosmic Tornado

The NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope observed Herbig-Haro 49/50, an outflow from a nearby still-forming star, in high-resolution near- and mid-infrared light with the NIRCam and MIRI instruments. The intricate features of the outflow, represented in reddish-orange color, provide detailed clues about how young stars form and how their jet activity affects the environment around them. A chance alignment in this direction of the sky provides a beautiful juxtaposition of this nearby Herbig-Haro object (located within our Milky Way) with a more distant, face-on spiral galaxy in the background.

The James Webb Space Telescope has captured another stunning image of space, this time showing the dramatic scenes around a baby star. Very young stars can throw off powerful jets of hot gas as they form, and when these jets collide with nearby dust and gas they form striking structures called Herbig-Haro objects.

This new image shows Herbig-Haro 49/50, located nearby to Earth at just 630 light-years away in the constellation Chamaeleon. Scientists have observed this object before, using the Spitzer Space Telescope, and they named the object the "Cosmic Tornado" because of its cone-like shape. To show the impressive powers of James Webb to capture objects like this one in exquisite detail, you can compare the Spitzer image from 2006 and the new James Webb image.

Space

NASA’s Webb telescope peers straight at Saturn-like planets 130 light-years away

Saturn captured by the James Webb Space Telescope.

The James Webb Space Telescope is NASA's most precise and technically proficient equipment for observing the wonders of the universe. Astronomers rely on it to unravel the deepest secrets by peaking at distant solar systems and capturing planets like those in ours.

Much recently, the Webb Telescope was able to capture its first direct image of exoplanets nearly 130 light-years away from the Earth. The observatory seized images of four "giant" planets in the solar system of a distant star called HR 8799. This is a fairly young system formed roughly 30 million years ago, a timeline that dwarfs in comparison to our solar system's 4.6 billion years of age.

Space

James Webb captures a stunning view of the dreamy Flame Nebula

Webb's image of the Flame Nebula

Our universe is host to many beautiful and fascinating objects, and we're lucky enough to be able to view many of them using high tech instruments like the James Webb Space Telescope. A new Webb image shows a new view of the gorgeous Flame Nebula, an emission nebula located in the constellation of Orion.

This nebula is a busy stellar nursery, with many new stars being formed there. But it isn't stars which researchers were interested in when they looked to the nebula -- in this case, they were studying objects called brown dwarfs. Bigger than most planets but smaller than a star, brown dwarfs are too small to sustain fusion in their cores, so they are often referred to as failed stars.