This month, Mozilla Hubs, a place where you can get together with friends online in a virtual-social space, partnered with conceptual artist Ashley Zelinskie on her New York exhibition, Unfold the Universe: First Light. The exhibition features her VR artwork Unfolding the Universe: A NASA Webb VR Experience in Mozilla Hubs. The exhibit runs through October 23rd (more details visit here), and for those who want to visit virtually, you can visit the VR portion of the exhibition here: https://unfoldtheuniverse.myhubs.net/.

Earlier this year, Mozilla Hubs was contacted by conceptual artist Ashley Zelinskie on a project with the NASA James Webb team. They wanted to make space exploration accessible to everyone. Mozilla Hubs seized this out-of-world opportunity as a chance to do real life testing with their subscription service before making it available next week.

On December 25, 2021, the James Webb telescope launched into space. Conceptual artist Ashley Zelinskie wanted to commemorate the launch in a way that was approachable and reachable to many people. She worked with Mozilla Hubs to create an immersive experience featuring an animated sculpture and interactive portraiture of the NASA James Webb team. She featured the Mozilla Hubs installation titled Unfolding the Universe: A NASA Webb VR Experience in her solo exhibition, Unfolding the Universe: First Light. It includes the telescopes First Images data released this past July. The immersive experience could be seen through live projections on the gallery walls as part of the installation or directly through a web browser which is also available here. We caught up with Ashley Zelinskie to hear more about her experience working with Mozilla Hubs.

I had been to a few events in Mozilla Hubs. During the pandemic friends were hosting art exhibitions in Hubs as a way to share their work while in lock down. Through a virtual residency I was doing with Agora Digital Arts I met Pierre-Francois Gerard of Metaxu Studio and began building my own VR experience.

Not really. All my artwork starts out digital and then I have it fabricated. So I wasnt a stranger to working digitally but I had never focused on that being the final outcome. It was interesting to see all the steps it takes to polish and produce a piece that is fully digital.

I dont think there is another VR service on the market that would be this accessible to people with no experience.

I had never made anything in VR when the Webb team approached me, and they wanted something accessible especially during the pandemic. Most of my work starts digitally where Ill use 3D models. I dont use shaders nor animation. Ill use a grey model and then have it printed in 3D and finish it in the real world. I had never created it in this new environment. There were steps I hadnt thought of as an artist. I worked with Pierre who helped me see that I dont have to deal with reality, and I can make things fly and float. It was really eye-opening to see that I can make things spin and fly. I no longer had to worry about the real world issues I had previously with 3D printed items like it sagging under gravity when I design. Once I switched my mindset, I could create stars, planets, a black holes, and accretion disks. None of it could ever be produced in the real world. I was able to make the impossible and flip the design process on its head.

I have no background as a developer or coder. I found Hubs to be extremely approachable. I dont think there is another VR service on the market that would be this accessible to people with no experience.

Hubs was an easy choice for this project. When I was brainstorming a way to do public outreach during a pandemic with Maggie of the Webb team we landed on VR. It seemed to be the most immersive and interesting way to get people involved and interested. However we didnt want to cut people out that didnt have fancy VR headsets or little experience in VR. Hubs was the democratic solution to all these logistics. If we were going to invite the world to experience the Webb Telescope we wanted everyone to be able to attend.

We will be exhibiting a few different works of art in Mozilla Hubs. The first one being the one we created to commemorate the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope called Unfolding the Universe: A NASA Webb VR experience. This piece includes interactive portraits of scientists and engineers on the Webb team, a custom musical soundscape, and digitally animated version of sculptures that will be shown in the ONX gallery. Since the first images were released we created two new works to reflect the new discoveries. One of the works depicts exoplanet spectroscopy data in the form of a rainbow aurora mountain landscape and the other is a totally new VR world inside the black hole at the center of the cartwheel galaxy.

Note: All photos credited to Caroline Xia, ONX Studio

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You don't have to be an astronaut to explore space, Mozilla Hubs can take you there - Mozilla & Firefox

President Biden will unveil the first color image from the James Webb Space Telescope at the White House on Monday, heralding the end of tests and checkout and the beginning of science operations by the world's most powerful space observatory.

"We're going to give humanity a new view of the cosmos, and it's a view that we've never seen before," NASA Administrator Bill Nelson, who will join Biden at the White House, told reporters in a preview briefing.

"One of those images ... is the deepest image of our universe that has ever been taken," he said. "And we're only beginning to understand what Webb can and will do."

NASA plans to release additional "first light" images Tuesday, photos designed to show off Webb's ability to capture light from the first generation of stars and galaxies; to chart the details of stellar evolution, from starbirth to death by supernova; and to study the chemical composition of exoplanet atmospheres.

For the past 30 years, the Hubble Space Telescope has become one of the most iconic instruments in astronomical history, helping astronomers pin down the age of the universe, confirming the presence of supermassive black holes, capturing the deepest views of the cosmos ever collected and providing fly-by class images of planets in Earth's solar system.

But Webb, operating at just a few degrees above absolute zero behind a tennis-court size sunshade, promises to push the boundaries of human knowledge even deeper with a 21.3-foot-wide segmented primary mirror capable of detecting the faint, stretched-out infrared light from the era when stars began "turning on" in the wake of the Big Bang.

Launched on Christmas Day, Webb is stationed in a gravitationally stable orbitnearly 1 million miles from Earth. For the past six months, engineers and scientists have been working through a complex series of deployments, activations and checkouts, fine tuning the telescope's focus and optimizing the performance of its four science instruments.

The initial images released Monday and Tuesday, selected by an international team of astronomers, will "demonstrate to the world that Webb is, in fact, ready for science, and that it produces excellent and spectacular results," said Klaus Pontoppidan, Webb project scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute.

"And it's also to highlight the breadth, the sheer breadth of science that can be done with Webb and to highlight all of the four science instruments," he added. "And last but not least, to celebrate the beginning of normal science operations."

The targets for Webb's first public images include:

"The first images will include observations that span the range of Webb science themes," said Pontoppidan. "From the early universe, the deepest infrared view of the cosmos to date. We will also see an example of how galaxies interact and grow, and how these cataclysmic collisions between galaxies drive the process of star formation.

"We'll see a couple of examples from the life cycle of stars, starting from the birth of stars, where Webb can reveal new, young stars emerging from their natal cloud of gas and dust, to the death of stars, like a dying star seeding the galaxy with new elements and new dust that may one day become part of new planetary systems."

Last but not least, he said, the team will show off the first chemical fingerprints from the atmosphere of an exoplanet.

One of the Hubble Space Telescope's most astonishing images was its initial "deep field" look at a tiny patch of seemingly empty sky over a 10-day period in 1995. To the amazement of professionals and the public alike, that long-exposure image revealed more than 3,000 galaxies of every shape, size and age, some of them the oldest, most distant ever seen.

Subsequent Hubble deep fields pushed even farther back in time, detecting the faint light of galaxies that were shining within about 500 million years of the Big Bang. How stars formed and got organized so quickly into galactic structures is still a mystery, as is the development of the supermassive black holes at their cores.

Webb's four instruments are expected to push the boundaries still closer to the beginning of galaxy formation. A test image from the telescope's Canadian-built Fine Guidance Sensor, an image that wasn't optimized for the detection of extremely faint objects, nonetheless revealed thousands of galaxies.

Webb's look at SMACS 0723 is expected to demonstrate the enormous reach of the observatory.

"This is really only the beginning, we're only scratching the surface," Pontoppidan said. "We have in the first images, a few days worth of observations. Looking forward, we have many years of observation, so we can only imagine what that will be."

Bill Harwood has been covering the U.S. space program full-time since 1984, first as Cape Canaveral bureau chief for United Press International and now as a consultant for CBS News. He covered 129 space shuttle missions, every interplanetary flight since Voyager 2's flyby of Neptune and scores of commercial and military launches. Based at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, Harwood is a devoted amateur astronomer and co-author of "Comm Check: The Final Flight of Shuttle Columbia."

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James Webb Space Telescope images expected at White House unveiling ...

NASA, along with the European and Canadian space agencies, will be releasing the first science images from the brand new James Webb Space Telescopeon Tuesday, and now we know what celestial bodies we'll be seeing in those historic pictures.

JWST is the long-awaited successor to the Hubble Space Telescope that finally launched on Christmas Day after years of delays.

On Friday, NASA revealed the list of cosmic objects that JWST will target for its first batch of full-color images offering unprecedented and detailed views of deep space. If the telescope's stunning first test image is any indication, it's going to be as good as any Instagram feed out there.

The targets include the Carina Nebula and Southern Ring Nebula, which are bright areas of gas and other material. The Carina Nebula (pictured above) is a so-called stellar nursery where stars are forming, and it's filled with massive stars that help make it one of the largest and brightest nebulas in the sky. The Southern Ring Nebula is a planetary nebula -- in this case, a wide cloud of gas half a light-year in diameter surrounding a dying star -- and relatively close on a cosmic scale, at just 2,000 light-years away.

The southern ring nebula is also known as the "Eight-Burst" Nebula because of it appears to be a figure-8 when seen through some telescopes.

Two other targets we'll see in fantastic high resolution next week are the galaxy group Stephan's Quintet, a particularly photogenic grouping of galaxies that seem to be dancing around each other for eternity, and SMACS 0723, which is a massive galaxy cluster that can act as a so-called gravitational lens to help scientists see deeper into space and observe fainter galaxies.

This quintet of galaxies is made up of four galaxies that are actually near each other and a fifth that appears nearby but is really in the foreground and much closer to Earth.

JWST also is taking a look at the planet WASP-96b, a gas giant world about half the mass of Jupiter and located 1,150 light-years from Earth. The powerful new instruments on the space telescope should be able to provide new insights into the composition of the planet's atmosphere and a fun teaser of what we'll soon discover about other exoplanets, including those that are more Earth-like.

The images that the space agencies will unveil on July 12 are just the beginning. Scientists have applied to use the telescope through a competitive process, and the first year of observations have already been scheduled. It's quite likely that JWST will change our perspective on some aspects of the universe in the months and years to come.

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NASA's James Webb Space Telescope: Here's What You'll See in the First ...

President Joe Biden will unveil the much-anticipated first full-color image from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope on Monday, agency officials confirmed.

The image, known as "Webb's First Deep Field," will be the deepest and highest-resolution infrared view of the universe ever captured, showing myriad galaxies as they appeared up to 13 billion years in the past, according to NASA.

The agency and its partners, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency, are set to release a separate batch of full-color images from the Webb telescope on Tuesday, but Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris and the public will get a sneak peek a day early.

NASA will brief the president and the vice president on Monday, agency officials said, and the first image will be revealed at an event at 5 p.m. ET at the White House.

The $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope ishumanitys largest and most powerful space telescope, and experts have said it could revolutionize our understanding of the cosmos.

After the White House event, NASA will unveil more images in an event streamed live Tuesday at 10:30 a.m. ET. NASA officials said that batch will include the Webb telescopes first spectrum of an exoplanet, showing light emitted at different wavelengths from a planet in another star system. The images could offer new insights into the atmospheres and chemical makeups of other exoplanets in the cosmos.

Some images included in the Tuesday release will show how galaxies interact and grow, and others will depict the life cycle of stars, from the emergence of new ones to violent stellar deaths.

The Webb telescope launched into space on Dec. 25.The tennis-court-size observatory is able to peer deeper into the cosmos and in greater detail than any telescope that has come before it.

Denise Chow is a reporter for NBC News Science focused on general science and climate change.

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First James Webb Telescope photo to be unveiled by Biden

An image captured by the James Webb Space Telescope's Fine Guidance Sensor reveals hundreds of distant galaxies.

(Image credit: NASA, CSA, and FGS team)

Update: Late on Sunday night (July 10), NASA announced that President Joe Biden would unveil the first of the new science-quality images on Monday (July 11) at 5 p.m. EDT (2100 GMT). You can watch the event live here on Space.com courtesy of the agency.

Original story: NASA will unveil the first science-quality images from its next-generation James Webb Space Telescope on Tuesday (July 12). You can watch the event live here on Space.com courtesy of the agency beginning at 10:30 a.m. EDT (1430 GMT).

As highly anticipated as these images will be, they aren't the first photos from the massive space observatory. The James Webb Space Telescope, also known as JWST or Webb, launched on Dec. 25, 2021, and since then, NASA and its partners on the project have offered tantalizing peeks at what is to come.

The image above, which NASA released on Wednesday (July 6), represents 32 hours of observing time from JWST's Fine Guidance Sensor. That device is not one of the telescope's four key science instruments; instead, it keeps the observatory pointing steadily at its target. Still, the image is the deepest field ever captured a superlative that NASA Administrator Bill Nelson hinted one of the formal first images would steal.

We'll be updating this gallery live on Tuesday to share the official first images as they are unveiled.

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James Webb Space Telescope's 1st photos | Space

Last week, NASA shared a photo captured by the James Webb Space Telescopes guidance camera that, while imperfect, is the deepest image ever captured of the universe so far.

While it is one thing to state that a photo is the farthest ever captured of the universe, it can be difficult to understand just how monumental that achievement is without some context. Ethan Gone, a self-described amateur astrophotographer who goes by the name k2qogir on Youtube, puts the photo in a more easily digestible perspective that truly showcases the incredible distance that James Webb is able to image.

In order to see the area of the sky that James Webb captured, Gone took a six-hour exposure of the same area and compared the results.

The recent James Webb Space Telescope(JWST) guide cameras test image looks really similar to Hubbles deep fields, which are my favorite. I decided to take a long exposure to the same target to see what my telescope can see and compare it to JWSTs image. I found one really faint galaxy 26 to 32 million light-years away, and a cute planetary nebula called Abell 39, Gone explains.

From his perspective, the rest of the area around that region was just empty space.

Match my image with the JWSTs color and zoom in to the same region, [and] my telescope can only offer a handful of faint stars, he says.

By comparison, James Webbs infrared telescope revealed what appears to be thousands of galaxies and stars in this small region of the night sky.

To better understand how impressive Webbs view of this region of space is, Gone shows that the area it imaged is approximately the size of the Mare Crisium on the Moon, for those looking into the sky from a perspective on Earth.

In short, what Webb imaged with its guidance camera is just one astronomically tiny portion of the sky that looks nearly empty to those on Earth, yet through not even its main camera it was able to see a huge number of stars and galaxies. It showcases the sheer vastness of space and how much more humans can understand about the universe thanks to the exceptional power of the new observatory.

NASA is set to release the first full-color photos captured by the James Webb Space Telescope this week. The first will be released later today by President Joe Biden at 5:00 PM ET, with the other four to be released on July 12 starting at 10:40 AM EDT.

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Video Puts into Perspective How Powerful the James Webb Telescope Is - PetaPixel

The James Webb Space Telescope is slated to unlock the universe to researchers with powerful instruments capable of looking further back in time than ever before.

A new report published in Nature last Friday estimates that the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) will be slapped by at least one meteorite per month for the rest of its life. Notably, NASA stated in early June that its next-generation space telescope was struck by a micrometeorite in May, and that the impact didn't cause any significant damage. However, over time NASA estimates that micrometeorite impacts will reduce the total lifespan on if the observatory.

So far, Webb has been smacked by five micrometeorites, with the fifth being the most recent and the largest. When Webb was being designed, engineers knew the large observatory would be prone to fast-moving dust particles impacting the mirrors, which is why they took a large amount of time testing how much Webb's mirrors could endure micrometeorite impacts.

According to estimations, on average, Webb will be hit with one micrometeorite per month, and after 10 years, only 0.1% of the primary mirror would be damaged. Webb has an anticipated lifespan of 20 years.

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NASA says the James Webb Space Telescope will be hit by meteorites - TweakTown

NASA has decided to reveal the first James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) image today rather than waiting until tomorrow as planned, it announced in a tweet. President Joe Biden will do the honor at 5PM ET, with a live stream of the event available on NASA TV and images available simultaneously on NASA's website.

Anticipation has been building for the first images, to say the least. NASA stoked that on Friday by announcing the targets to be shown, including the Carina and Southern Ring Nebulae, the gas exoplanet WASP-96b and a deep field view of the SMACS 0723 galaxy clusters. Only a select group of scientists and administrators have viewed the images so far. "What I have seen moved me, as a scientist, as an engineer, and as a human being," said NASA deputy administrator Pam Melroy.

It appears that just a single image will be revealed today, but NASA didn't say which one. The rest are still slated to arrive tomorrow, starting at 9:45 with remarks by NASA and Webb leadership. That'll be followed by live coverage of the image release slated for 10:30 AM ET on NASA TV, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Twitch and Daily Motion.

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President Biden will reveal the first James Webb Space Telescope image today at 5PM ET - Yahoo! Voices

After two decades and more than $10 billion, the most powerful telescope yet built will finally be making its splashy public debut Monday with a little help from the president of the United States.

On Monday evening, U.S. President Joe Biden will release one of the first science images captured by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), arguably the most complex machine that humanity has ever built, according to one of its creators.

Launched in late December, the Webb telescope is 100 times more powerful than its astronomy-altering predecessor, the Hubble, thanks primarily to a mirror that has 6.25 times the area. Its designed to observe the celestial skies in infrared, not only allowing it to pierce the veils of cosmic dust that often obscure visible light, but better equipping it to see objects in the furthest reaches of the universe.

Its spent the past six months travelling to its orbit 1.5 million kilometres from Earth, deploying, testing and calibrating its instruments. The picture to be released Monday, is one of the first five science images the rest to be released Tuesday selected to show off the new telescopes astronomic observation chops.

When you see the images, first of all, theyre just stunning, like very visually beautiful, says Sarah Gallagher, science adviser to the Canadian Space Agency president, whos already had a sneak peek.

They have some of the elements that youve seen from Hubble with the richness of the structures and the details. But theyre really next-level because Webb is so much more sensitive. Its beautiful, just exquisite imaging. Itll really jump out at you.

The five images to be released were selected not only to show off the capabilities of the new telescope, but also to highlight the four major themes of Webb telescope research, she says.

One is of an exoplanet, a gas giant like Jupiter, only about half the size. Another image will be looking across the furthest reaches of the universe to see galaxies in their earliest stages of development. Another will probe deeper into our own Milky Way to see how stars are formed. And yet another will be looking at what happens when those stars begin to die.

While those first science images to be released arent connected to any particular research, Gallagher says theyre already showing us things that weve never seen before.

I have colleagues who are going to jump on these data the second that theyre available and download them and start working on them, she says. I expect theres going to be papers that start being submitted within days with this new data. The astronomy community is definitely very excited.

Bidens late arrival on the Webb bandwagon should not detract from the veritable army that has spent the last two decades getting the telescope off the ground.

When the JWST launched on Christmas Day last year, it carried with it the hopes, dreams and left behind the furrowed brows and chewed fingernails of thousands of scientists, engineers and technicians from 14 countries and three space agencies: NASA, the Canadian Space Agency and the European Space Agency.

The release of that first image marks the completion of one of mankinds most herculean tasks that of conceptualizing, designing, manufacturing, testing, launching, deploying and calibrating an instrument that makes the famed Hubble telescope pale in comparison.

Its now orbiting the Sun in the deep cold of space, some 1.5 million kilometres from this planet, four times further away from us than the moon, and far enough to minimize interference from the Earth and Sun.

But with the completion of that task, the work that the JWST was intended to do the scientific work has only just begun.

Researchers across the world are rubbing their hands together with glee at the thought of the what the telescope could produce.

When the research begins, thousands of astronomers will be using the Webb telescope to probe back in time to an era only a few hundred million years after the Big Bang itself, a time astronomers refer to as the Dark Age, when the first stars began to appear.

The light collected by the telescope will have been travelling toward it for more than 13 billion years, giving researchers a picture of what the universe looked like when that light began its journey.

The Webb telescope is the most sophisticated, complex space science instrument that has ever been created, says Gallagher. And it works. It works beautifully. It works exactly as expected.

There have been people thinking about what this telescope is going to do for years. And the fact that its delivering, and in some areas delivering better than expected, means theyre going realize those expectations of what they were hoping to do.

The first five science images

Carina Nebula: Nebulae are the stellar nurseries in which stars are born. Carina is one of the largest and brightest in the night skies, approximately 7,600 light-years away, in the constellation Carina, and home to many stars several more times massive than our sun. Its also home to the most luminous star we know of in the Milky Way the primary star of WR25, a binary star system. Its about 2.4 million times brighter than our sun.

WASP-96 b: a giant, mostly gaseous planet nearly 1,150 light-years from Earth. Its about half the mass of Jupiter, and it orbits its star every 3.4 days. The JWST will allow scientists to analyze the atmosphere of the planet, by looking at the spectrum of light from distant stars passing through it.

Southern Ring Nebula: Also called the Eight-Burst Nebula, its an expanding cloud of gas surrounding a dying star. Its about 2,000 light-years from Earth and is about half a light-year in diameter. An analysis of some of the elements present in the outer layers of the nebula may give us a clue to some of the processes involved in the formation of new solar systems.

SMACS 0723: This is an area where the gravity of a cluster of galaxies in the foreground distorts space in such a way that they act like a lens, enabling astronomers to have a better view of objects in the background, objects that, because of their extreme distance, appear as they did in the earliest days of the universe. The process is called gravitational lensing.

Stephans Quintet: A grouping of five galaxies, about 290 million light-years away, in the constellation Pegasus. Four of the five galaxies are gravitationally bound to each other, resulting in a series of close encounters. The fifth galaxy is actually a foreground galaxy, about seven times closer to Earth than the rest. The cluster was first identified in the 1800s its been studied extensively since.

Canadian contributions

Near Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph: The NIRISS, which observes infrared wavelengths, also includes a spectrograph, which allows astronomers to look at the atmospheres of planets, to determine whether there are traces of gases such as oxygen, carbon dioxide or methane which might indicate the possibility that life might exist on those planets.

Fine Guidance Sensor: The FGS targets a series of stars as reference points and, measuring their positions 16 times per second, uses them to keep the telescope pointed at its target. Right now, its being used to help scientists calibrate the mirror segments.

Its so accurate that it can detect the telescope being off target by the equivalent of the width of a human hair at a distance of a kilometre.

While its not an observational instrument per se, it is capable of capturing data images that help with its main function keeping the Webb telescope pointed in exactly the right direction.

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James Webb Telescope's first 'stunning' science images set to be revealed - Welland Tribune

Good morning. It's Monday, July 11,and you're reading The Loop, a quick wrap-up of today's news.

Novak Djokovic has defeated Australian Nick Kyrgios in the Wimbledon men's singles final but capped off an eventful match with some generous praise for his opponent.

Djokovic who has won the last four finals at the All England Club and seven in total said in a post-matchinterview that he believes this won't be the last we see of Kyrgios in grand slam finals.

"I wish you all the best. I really respect you a lot. I think you are a phenomenal tennis player and athlete," Djokovic said to Kyrgios.

If you missed the match, look back on the best bits here.

We're less than 24 hours away from seeing the first full-colour images from the new James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).

The images are expected to bethe most-detailedsnapshots ever taken of our cosmos.

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Date from the JWST will also include the chemical fingerprint of an atmosphere from a hellishly alien planet about halfthe massof Jupiter, known as WASP-96b.

"What I've already seen has moved me as a scientist, as an engineer, as a human,"NASA deputy administrator Pam Melroy says.

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The Loop: Djokovic defeats Kyrgios in Wimbledon final, Steve Bannon reportedly agrees to testify at January 6 hearing, first James Webb Space...