On August 24th, a vital instrument aboard the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) experienced a malfunction that prompted the mission team to take it offline. The problem occurred when the Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) experienced increased friction in one of its wheels while in Medium-Resolution Spectroscopy (MRS) mode. The mission team took MIRI offline while they attempted to diagnose the problem, ...
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Wow! Here’s Webb’s View of the Tarantula Nebula
Here’s the Tarantula Nebula like we’ve never seen it before. The James Webb Space Telescope turned its detectors towards the Large Magellanic Cloud about 161,000 lightyears away to take a look at 30 Doradus, more commonly known as the Tarantula Nebula. JWST’s exceptional infrared view has now revealed thousands of never-before-seen young stars in this stellar nursery, as well incredible ...
Read More »‘Panic!’ Around JWST, Exoplanet With CO2, Weak Mars Astronauts
No, James Webb didn’t disprove the Big Bang. Carbon dioxide found in an exoplanet atmosphere. An amazing picture of Jupiter from Webb, pieces of other stars found in asteroid Ryugu, weak astronauts arriving on Mars, and a new way to measure distances in the Universe. It was a week full of space events, so the video version of the Space ...
Read More »Here’s the Largest Image JWST Has Taken So Far
A team of scientists using the James Webb Space Telescope have just released the largest image taken by the telescope so far. The image is a mosaic of 690 individual frames taken with the telescope’s Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam) and it covers an area of sky about eight times as large as JWST’s First Deep Field Image released on July ...
Read More »Astronomers List 88 Distant Galaxies They Want to Look at With JWST. Some Are Less Than 200 Million Years Old.
Way back in the earliest ages of the universe, the first galaxies were born. Astronomers want to know more about them. They’re especially interested to know exactly when these distant galaxies formed and what their stars were like. Now that JWST is a working observatory, astronomers are excited to use its data to explore those early epochs. They’re eager to ...
Read More »JWST Turns Its Gaze on the Cartwheel Galaxy
The Cartwheel Galaxy, also known as ESO 350-40, is one disturbed-looking piece of cosmic real estate. To look at it now, especially in the latest JWST view, you’d never know it used to be a gorgeous spiral galaxy. That was before it got involved in a head-on collision with a companion. The encounter happened somewhere around 200-300 million years ago. ...
Read More »JWST Damage, New Mars Helicopters, Teaching Robots to Die
JWST is doing after its micrometeorite strike, two more helicopters are flying to Mars, China will drop a 50+ meter booster… somewhere, and how do you stop the Milky Way from turning into self-replicating robot probes. This week brought us many exciting and sometimes even scary space news. If you’re in the mood to relax and consume them in a ...
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