James Webb Space Telescope operating better than expected

TUCSON, Ariz. (KGUN) — Bigger and better than the famous Hubble Space Telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope launched back on Christmas Day.

Six months later, it’s now sending back pictures and data from outer space while still being ‘commissioned,’ or tested.

“And still, it’s mind-blowingly beautiful, the sensitivity of these instruments and the science,” said Kevin Hainline, a professor at the University of Arizona and one of the scientists behind the telescopes Near Infrared Camera or ‘NIRCAM.’

The NIRCAM sees infrared light that human eyes can’t. And it sees light so far away, that it’s billions of years old.

Watching how that light evolves will give scientists clues as to how our universe formed after the Big Bang.

“We’re gonna see the buildup of the first stars and the first galaxies,” Hainline explained. “And a lot of that science is gonna be done in the next months to year across many different scientific projects, for many different groups.”

That explosion of science is about to start.

NASA will release the JWST’s first full-color images and scientific data on July 12, likely including views of the furthest galaxy we’ve ever seen and an exoplanet’s atmosphere.

“There’s so many smart scientists who have been working on this for so long. Decades in a couple cases,” Hainline said of his partners at UArizona. “Seeing their excitement amplifies my own excitement. We’ve all been working really hard and now, we’re sitting back and watching as like, the return on our investment is starting to come in. And I don’t know, this is the most exciting part of my scientific career, easily.”

The telescope is actually performing better than scientists thought it could.

“There’s a lot of things that had to happen to all of our very sensitive cameras,” Hainline explained. “They were built, they’ve been shaken up, they’ve been put on a rocket, they’ve been blasted into space. So when NASA built their benchmarks, they built them conservatively because a lot of stuff can go wrong. And what we’re learning is that this launch was so smooth and perfect, that these instruments are working better, as well as they could, in fact they’re working better than the conservative benchmarks.”

That includes the JWST’s projected lifespan—which Hainline says went from 5-10 years… to 20 years.

That means two decades of answering questions about our universe, including some we haven’t even asked yet.