The James Webb Space Telescope sends back a selfie

Nasa shared an image of the Webb telescope’s mirror segments focusing on a single star

An image of the James Webb Space Telescope’s primary mirror focusing the light of a single star taken by the telescope’s primary imaging instrument (Nasa)

The James Webb Space Telescope just sent back a selfie.

As part of the process of aligning Webb’s segmented primary mirror with its main imaging instrument, the Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCAM), ground operators used the instrument to take an image of Webb’s 18 mirror segments all collecting light from a single star. Nasa’s Jet Propulsion laboratory posted the resulting glowing, silvery, snowflake-like image on Twitter Wednesday.

Launched on 25 December after more than two decades of development, Webb is the largest space telescope ever deployed, and is designed to view the furthest reaches of time and space.

Researchers hope to use the telescope to capture images of the very first galaxies in the universe, distinguish the atmospheric components of distant worlds, and provide a new look at planets in our own solar system.

Webb reached its current operational orbit about 1 million miles from Earth in late January after a month-long journey that saw the complex telescope, folded tightly for launch, unfold and deploy solar panels, sunshields, and its 6.5 metre-diameter primary mirror. Ground operators have spent the past two months aligning and calibrating Webb’s optics, and its optics with its instruments.

After finishing the alignment of NIRCAM, the Webb team will move on to aligning the telescope’s other instruments, the Near-Infrared Spectrograph, Mid-Infrared Instrument, and Near InfraRed Imager and Slitless Spectrograph. It’s a process expected to last into May, according to a Nasa blog.

After all instruments are aligned, researchers will spend another two months preparing Webb’s instruments themselves for doing science. The first scientific images from Webb are expected sometime in late summer.