In two weeks, we expect to get the first science images from this many-meter space telescope. We’ll be providing live coverage on our Twitch channel as it happens, and then covering it here on NowMedia. Any normal summer, we would go into our summer hiatus during the Fourth of July week and then come back the week of Labor Day. This year, we’re hanging on for that July 12 release, and our last day of the season will be July 15, and when we come back, it will be with a special episode on JWST’s results over the summer.

For now, all we can say is images are coming, and as of June 27, NASA had confirmed one more of JWST’s instruments is ready to start work. The Near-Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph instrument, or NIRISS, has returned test data showing it can focus the light of a single object through a spectrograph to spread that light out into detailed rainbows that can be used to study how light is being emitted and absorbed by different atoms in different colors. This is about the ugliest telescope data you can look at, but it is how we may one day figure out the expansion of our universe and the compositions of different planets’ atmospheres.

Now to wait for those first images – or spectra – that will tell us just what this many billion-dollar, decade-delayed telescope can actually do. Things are looking promising.

More Information

Webb’s NIRISS Ready to See Cosmos in Over 2,000 Infrared Colors (NASA)