Last December, I wrote about the upcoming launch of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). The JWST took 26 years to plan, design, and construct. The JWST is mechanically and mission-wise incredibly complex. The telescope will be kept very cold at -370 degrees Fahrenheit, so it needs to be shielded from the heat of the Sun, Earth, and Moon. 

A large shield with five layers of reflective film as thin as human hair will protect the JWST mirror and instruments from the rays of the Sun, Earth, and Moon. So those bodies are always on the correct side of the shield, JWST is parked in a unique orbit 930,000 miles from Earth, three times the Moon’s distance. 

Because the primary mirror is larger in diameter than any available launch rocket, once in space, the mirrors and shield must unfold to a shape within one-hundredth the thickness of human hair. The risks were great. 

NASA, with assistance from the European Space Agency, pulled it off. Astronomers call the first images from a new telescope “first light.” JWST cost $10 billion and required the labor of a thousand workers in 17 countries. First light occurred in February of this year. But one star appeared 18 times in an image. Talk about double vision! 

But this was planned. The primary mirror consisted of 18 separate segments that had to unfold after JWST was parked. NASA began the precise alignment of each mirror, a fine-tuning job that took months. A micro-meteoroid has already struck one mirror segment. This had a small effect but will not jeopardize the mission. When God said, “let there be light,” he illuminated not only our path but our minds as well. Light is an amazing gift of creation. When collected by a giant mirror and passed through a spectrograph, light rays reveal what chemical elements emitted that light, what gases the light passed through, and the speed of that object toward or away from us. His light reveals many secrets of the universe to us. Helium was discovered in the rays of the Sun before being found on Earth. 

In 1929, Edwin Hubble discovered that the more distant galaxies traveled away from us more rapidly. This eventually led to the theory that the universe is expanding. Edwin Hubble was the namesake of the precursor to JWST, the Hubble Space Telescope. His theory means that at the edge of the universe, objects travel away from us at the maximum speed predicted by Einstein, the speed of light. 

But this has implications for telescopes. As distant objects travel rapidly away from us, their light is shifted in frequency downward, downward so low it is no longer visible, but into the infrared, which is heat. So as not to be blinded by its own heat, JWST must be kept cold, very cold.

On July 12, NASA plans to release some of the first images from JWST. To us, they will be simply pictures of God’s creation. Over time, scientists will learn about galaxies at the edge of the universe as they study this low-frequency light. 

Because light takes time to travel, far away also means back to nearly the beginning of time. If the very complex JWST continues to operate over the next few years, you can expect more fascinating discoveries. An astronomer’s first light is his early light.

Would you like to learn more about telescopes and deep space? My book “Astronomy is Heavenly” is available at the Bookshelf in Thomasville and on Amazon.