Captured in infrared light by NASA's new James Webb Space Telescope, this image reveals for the first time previously invisible areas of star birth. This mosaic was constructed from almost 1,000 separate image files, according to NASA.Ī landscape of mountains and valleys speckled with glittering stars is actually the edge of a nearby, young, star-forming region called NGC 3324 in the Carina Nebula, on Jin space.

This image shows Stephan's Quintet, a visual grouping of five galaxies captured by the Webb Telescope's Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) and Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI). The first image from the James Webb Space Telescope shows thousands of galaxies, the deepest and sharpest image of the early universe ever taken. Nevertheless, the images are remarkable, so here’s a glimpse at some of the coolest ones. It’s able to show us thousands of galaxies and stars that have a psychedelic feeling to them, probably because it’s challenging to comprehend what exactly we’re looking at. The powers of the Webb Telescope - “the world’s largest and most powerful space telescope” that’s decades in the making thanks to international partnerships - offer those of us on Earth the deepest views of the cosmos that have ever been seen. The images, according to NASA, “represent the first wave of full-color scientific images and spectra the observatory has gathered, and the official beginning of Webb’s general science operations.” More images were released Tuesday, and wow, they’re incredible.

This latter approach is being taken by the ExoMars rover ( ) under development where drilled samples taken from a depth of up to 2 meters will be analyzed.Space is incredibly awesome, beyond terrifying or a little of both - depending on your perspective.īut some things about it are undeniably cool, like the first images from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, which President Joe Biden released Monday during a White House briefing, as USA TODAY noted. Future missions must either find surface regions where erosion from wind-blown sand has recently exposed very ancient material, or alternately samples must be obtained from a shielded region beneath the surface. However, over hundreds of millions of years these molecular fossils on Mars are subject to being destroyed or transformed to the point where they may no longer be recognized as biosignatures. We can search for evidence of cells preserved in rocks, or at a much smaller scale: compounds called biosignatures are molecular fossils, specific compounds that give some indication of the organisms that created them. MEP is now developing the Mars 2020 rover mission ( ) to determine whether life may have left telltale signatures in the rocks on Mars’s surface, a further shift to the current science theme “Seek the Signs of Life”.įinding fossils preserved from early Mars might tell us that life once flourished on this planet. After establishing that Mars once had significant amount of water on its surface, the Mars Science Laboratory (which includes the Curiosity rover) was sent to Mars to determine whether Mars had the right ingredients in the rocks to host life, signaling a shift to the next theme of “Explore Habitability”. The Pathfinder mission and Mars Exploration Rovers (Spirit and Opportunity) were sent to Mars to “Follow the Water,” recognizing that liquid water is necessary for life to exist on Earth. The field of Astrobiology saw a resurgence due to the controversy surrounding the possible fossil life in the ALH84001 meteorite, and from the outsized public response to this announcement, and subsequent interest from Congress and the White House, NASA’s Astrobiology Program ( )and one of its major programs, the NASA Astrobiology Institute ( ) were formed.Īlso at this time, NASA’s Mars Exploration Program began to investigate Mars with an increasing focus on missions to the Red Planet.

The twin Viking landers of 1976 were NASA’s first life detection mission, and although the results from the experiments failed to detect life in the Martian regolith, and resulted in a long period with fewer Mars missions, it was not the end of the fascination that the Astrobiology science community had for the red planet. However, the exploration of Mars has been intertwined with NASA’s search for life from the beginning. Astrobiology is a relatively new field of study, where scientists from a variety of disciplines (astronomy, biology, geology, physics, etc.) work together to understand the potential for life to exist beyond Earth.

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