Infrared telescopes

NASA says the Webb Space Telescope’s Near Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph is currently unavailable for science operations following a software glitch earlier this month.In a release published yesterday, the agency stated that the issue started on January 15, when a communications delay within the instrument caused its flight software to time out. Flight software is a crucial aspect of any instrument operating in space, as it manages a whole suite of operations on a given spacecraft, including its orientation,…

The Webb Space Telescope’s instruments have been in safe mode intermittently since December 7, but scientific operations resumed earlier this week, NASA said in a press release on Wednesday.Webb was in safe mode—during which all the observatory’s nonessential systems are turned off, which means no scientific operations—multiple times in the last two weeks, the release stated. Though NASA says the issue is resolved and “the observatory and instruments are all in good health,” the agency also did not report the glitch until…

An illustration of the Near Earth Object Surveyor, which is scheduled for launch in June 2028.Illustration: NASA/JPL-CaltechNASA’s plan for an upcoming infrared asteroid-hunting telescope, called Near Earth Object (NEO) Surveyor, has officially changed. NEO Surveyor’s expected price tag has doubled from an estimated high of $600 million to a whopping $1.2 billion, while the launch has also been pushed from 2026 to June 2028.The planned NEO Surveyor mission has passed a NASA technical review, but with some important, if…

The Webb Space Telescope snapped images of Saturn’s moon Titan last month, which are now released for our viewing pleasure. The images offer a newly detailed view of Titan’s atmospheric makeup and even elements of its strange surface.The telescope’s NIRCam instrument, which images in the near-infrared range, captured the views. They show clouds in Titan’s atmosphere (whimsically named A and B in annotated images) but also a blurry look at Kraken Mare, which is thought to be a methane sea, as well as dark sand dunes.More…

NASA officials spoke at a House subcommittee hearing Wednesday morning about the status of the Webb Space Telescope, which has been capturing images of the universe near and far since early this summer. During the meeting, they revealed Webb’s latest portrait: a shot of a dark cloud called L1527 and the light emanating from a protostar at its core.L1527 is about 460 light-years from Earth and stretches 0.3 light-years across. At its center there is a protostar, a very young star that is still forming. The cloud was…

Side-by-side shots of the the dwarf galaxy Wolf-Lundmark-Melotte, taken by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope and the Webb Space Telescope, reveal the impressive resolution offered by the newer telescope. Star Wars: Shatterpoint Announcement Trailer02:27The First Things To Do In VR, Part 3Today 9:39AMWolf-Lundmark-Melotte is an isolated dwarf galaxy about 3 million light-years from the Milky Way and roughly 10 times smaller. Its galactic halo is about 8,000 light-years across and is thought to be fairly ancient.It was first…

The Webb Space Telescope before it was packed and shipped to French Guiana for launch. Photo: NASAAfter a hiatus, one of Webb Space Telescopes cameras will be fully operational again following an engineering test that took place last week.Webb’s Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) will resumeobservations using its medium-resolution spectrometry (MRS) mode by November 12, NASA announced Tuesday in a blog post. The instrument had suffered a minor glitch on August 24 due to increased friction in one of MRS’ grating wheels. Since…

A week and a half ago, NASA released a stunning image of the iconic Pillars of Creation taken by the Webb Space Telescope, a $10 billion state-of-the-art space observatory that launched last December.Now, the space agency has shared a shot of the same structure taken with Webb’s Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI). It’s a perfectly terrifying image to releasedays before Halloween.The Pillars of Creation are huge structures made of gas and dust that form one arm of the Eagle Nebula, a cluster of stars about 6,500 light-years…

The hits keep coming from Webb Space Telescope, which has now spotted a rainbow “knot” consisting of an extremely red quasar and a snarl of massive galaxies that existed about 11.5 billion years ago.The remarkable image comes just a day after the telescope’s first view of the iconic Pillars of Creation, in a redux of the image of the gas clouds so famously capturedby the Hubble Space Telescope in 1995.Quasars are energetic centers of galaxies that appear very bright in the night sky. Quasars have supermassive black holes…

Hubble and Webb images showing the immediate effects of the DART experiment to deflect an asteroid. Image: NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScIFresh imagesfrom two famous space-based telescopes are shedding new light on NASA’s DART mission to deflect a harmless asteroid.The NASA spacecraft intentionally crashed into Dimorphos on the evening of September 26 following a 10-month journey to the binary asteroid system. Dimorphos, a football stadium-sized moonlet, and its larger companion, Didymos, are roughly 6.8 million miles (11…