People often ask: “Why do we build and fly instruments like JWST? What are we looking for out there?” We don’t know exactly that’s why we’re doing it. And you can count on us following this mission throughout its operations, sharing its discoveries with you as they happen. You can join me and the rest of The Planetary Society community tomorrow as we watch NASA release the first batch of images from JWST. We here at The Planetary Society are particularly excited about JWST’s ability to examine planets around other stars, which might unlock new insights into the possibilities of life beyond Earth. It could change the world. We’ll also get some of the initial science gleaned from the telescope’s observations, including an analysis of the components of an exoplanetary atmosphere. Tomorrow, NASA will release even more images from JWST. This is something worth celebrating today and always. There’s no doubt that countless of today’s young people will be inspired by JWST’s work to dedicate themselves to exploring this Universe we inhabit. Those scientists-and-engineers-to-be may have been inspired by the Hubble Space Telescope, which has been capturing jaw-dropping images of its own since the 1990s. To say that we’ve been waiting a lifetime for this image isn’t an overstatement work on this mission started in 1996, back when some members of today’s JWST mission team were just little kids. What we’re seeing is ancient light, reaching us after billions of years of travel, a snapshot of what the early Universe looked like more than 13 billion years ago. As far as we know, the speed of light is constant and finite. These galaxies are fantastically distant, more than 13 billion light-years away, from the very farthest reaches of the Universe. The image we see today is from an instrument much farther from Earth, where space gets especially cold. JWST’s predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope, sent us its own iconic deep field images from low Earth orbit. A “deep field” image is one that peers into the blackness of space in between visible stars to capture distant, dimmer stars and galaxies.
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