NASA Unveils Plans for Webb Space Telescope's First Birthday Party

By Adam Barnhardt

In just a few short days, the James Webb Space Telescope will celebrate its first year in commission. One year ago Wednesday, the space observatory returned its first images, officially making the object a working craft. Now, NASA plans to celebrate Webb's past 12-months with celebrations all day Wednesday.

At 6:00 a.m. Eastern time on Wednesday, July 12th, the Webb Telescope team will release another new image from the observatory, likely one to rival that of the first images unveiled this time last year. The team will then be partaking in interview opportunities with various media outlets before a live broadcast of NASA Science Live will air on NASA TV and its respective social media profiles.

Friday, NASA is hosting a free event at Baltimore's Enoch Pratt Free Library celebrating the telescope's history, and the space agency says it has plans to continue releasing new images from the craft all summer long.

"The James Webb Space Telescope is the world's premier space science observatory," NASA says of the telescope. "Webb is solving mysteries in our solar system, looking beyond to distant worlds around other stars, and probing the mysterious structures and origins of our universe and our place in it. Webb is an international program led by NASA with its partners, ESA (European Space Agency), and CSA (Canadian Space Agency)."

What is the Webb Space Telescope?

In short, the Webb observatory is the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope. Using its new technology, scientists have been able to examine parts of the known universe previously unobservable.

"If you think about that, this is farther than humanity has ever moved before," NASA administrator Bill Nelson previously said of the JWST. "And we're only beginning to understand what Webb can and will do. It's going to explore objects in the solar system and atmospheres of exoplanets orbiting other stars, giving us clues as to whether potentially their atmospheres are similar to our own."

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"Our goals for Webb's first images and data are both to showcase the telescope's powerful instruments and to preview the science mission to come," astronomer Klaus Pontoppidan, Webb project scientist at STScI, added of the images. "They are sure to deliver a long-awaited 'wow' for astronomers and the public."

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