The story behind the Bay Area-built camera that will usher in a new era of space exploration.
In a triumphant technological tour de force, a Bay Area-built camera the size of a coffee table is sending home snapshots of our infant universe from the James Webb Space Telescope, ushering in a new era of astronomical exploration.
“There’s joy. Elation. Relief that it’s all working, creating pictures are just gorgeous,” said Ferry of Emerald Hills. “And maybe I’m a little sad, knowing that this part of the journey is over.” The Webb telescope can’t show us the moment of our birth, when the universe came out of nothing about 14 billion years ago. For many years after this Big Bang, the cosmos was just a dense cloud, a dark and messy place.
Now it must work with utmost precision and stability in extreme cold temperatures aboard Webb, the largest and most powerful space telescope ever built.NIRCam and Webb’s other teams were conceived in 2002, when George W. Bush was president, the U.S. had just invaded Afghanistan and iPods were newly released. The Lockheed Martin team partnered with principal investigator Marcia Riki of the University of Arizona for the project.
Webb has a larger mirror than Hubble, so the camera’s images are higher resolution. While Hubble’s images were a bit fuzzy, Tuesday’s photos were breathtakingly clear and detailed. NIRCam can detect infrared light that ranges from 0.6 to five microns — far beyond the part of the spectrum that was visible to the lens of its predecessor, the Hubble telescope. That makes it possible to view much more ancient objects. As the universe expands, wavelengths shift. Because the oldest light is long and red, it cannot be viewed by human eyes and conventional telescopes.
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