So much for paper: NASA fetes telescope with stars for 1st anniversary

(CN) — It's been a full year since the James Webb Space Telescope entered outer-space service, intended to succeed the aging Hubble as NASA's flagship orbital telescope. To mark the occasion, NASA on Wednesday released a new image of the Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex, one of the closest star-forming regions to Earth.

Located some 400 light years away in the constellation Ophiuchus, the cluster of nebulae has given birth to numerous stars whose individual masses are similar to that of the sun. The image released Wednesday, captured over two days of observation this past March and April, features about 50 such sun-like stars. Most of them are still in their infancy. 

Some of those newborn stars are accented by hourglass-shaped shadows. They're a telltale sign of protoplanetary disks, the rings of gas, dust and debris left over from a star's birth that may one day coalesce into planets and asteroids. According to James Webb Space Telescope scientist Klaus Pontoppidan, these stars represent a chance to study how our middle-aged solar system developed.

"The disk is casting a shadow, like a lampshade casting a shadow on the wall. ... This is what our own solar system used to look like 4.5 billion years ago,” Pontoppidan said.

Elsewhere in the image, opaque brown regions represent thick molecular clouds where nascent stars are still forming. These are accented by red ribbons of molecular hydrogen — the afterbirth thrown off by new stars whose cores have only just begun to fuse hydrogen into helium. Dominating the center of the image is a cavern of hydrocarbon gas illuminated by the star designated S1. Weighing in at about two solar masses, it's one of the few stars featured in the photo that's significantly larger than the sun.

"It's still a very young star," Pontoppidan said of S1.

NASA scientists released the James Webb Space Telescope's first images to the public on July 12, 2022, a day after U.S. President Joe Biden and other White House officials got an exclusive preview of them. The $10 billion telescope launched on Christmas Day 2021.

NASA, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency collaborated on the new telescope for over two decades, tapping Northrop Grumman for most of the construction, with the goal of launching an eventual successor to the Hubble Space Telescope.

Unlike Hubble, which has orbited Earth since 1990, the JWST doesn't revolve around the Earth. It operates beyond the orbit of the moon at what's known as the second Lagrange Point in the Sun-Earth system. It's one of five points in space where the gravitational forces of the Earth and sun are in equilibrium. This placement allows the telescope to circle the sun in a relatively stationary position relative to the Earth's own orbit, while also avoiding atmospheric drag or interference from commercial satellites and orbital space debris.

Pontoppidan, who has worked on the JWST for 13 years, said the telescope has undergone numerous changes since 1996 when the "next-generation space telescope" project was conceived. Though the basic design of the instrument was decided relatively early in development, it subsequently underwent major hardware upgrades to allow it to study exoplanets in more depth.

"One of the big things that happened since its inception is we discovered more planets around other stars," Pontoppidan said. "So we made a lot of changes to the hardware to make sure it could study those planets."

The telescope's name — taken in honor of former NASA Administrator James E. Webb, who oversaw the agency between 1961 and 1968 — also proved controversial as construction proceeded.

Pointing to his time as undersecretary of state from 1949 to 1952, critics accused Webb of involvement in the mass purge of LGBTQ individuals from government jobs in the 1940s and '50s known as the "Lavender Scare" — a parallel moral panic to the anti-communist Red Scare occurring during the same period, codified into law via former president Dwight Eisenhower's Executive Order 10450.

In November 2022, NASA dismissed any potential of a name change for the telescope after it closed an investigation of Webb's involvement in the Lavender Scare. The investigation asserted Webb had no direct involvement in the firing of individuals based on their sexual orientation.

"In conclusion, to date, no available evidence directly links Webb to any actions or follow-up related to the firing of individuals for their sexual orientation," the study concluded.

The initial construction of the telescope finished meantime in 2016, though subsequent testing and tweaks continued for another two years. The final product was a telescope the size of a tennis court, weighing over 14,000 pounds and equipped to capture images primarily in the infrared spectrum. Infrared light passes through cosmic gas and dust more easily than light in the visible spectrum, allowing the JWST to observe the universe with unprecedented clarity.

While an even more advanced orbital telescope is planned to launch in 2027 — the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is named in honor of NASA's first female executive and first chief of astronomy Nancy Grace Roman — Pontoppidan said Webb would continue to capture images for at least another two decades.

"It was a good launch, so we have a lot of fuel left over. It has more than 20 years of fuel to go," he said.

It's still unclear what will happen to the JWST at the end of that 20-year period, Pontoppidan added. Most likely, it will simply be retired from active use. But he didn't rule out the possibility that it could be repaired and refueled for observations further into the future.

"It wasn't designed to be refueled. That doesn't mean you can't do it." Pontoppidan said.

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