Elon Musk tries to play down NASA’s James Webb Telescope discovery
NASA has recently been releasing breathtaking images of cosmic taken through James Webb Space Telescope
Billionaire Elon Musk, known for his wittiness, has done it again as he took a jibe at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) for its James Webb Space Telescope discovery.
NASA has recently been releasing breathtaking images of the cosmic taken through the James Webb Space Telescope.
But Musk tried to play it down on Friday.
Posting a picture on Twitter with the caption “Nice try, NASA”, Musk showed a kitchen slab that depicted a cosmic-like pattern.
On Monday, Webb revealed the clearest image to date of the early universe, going back 13 billion years.
The stunning shot, released in a White House briefing by President Joe Biden, is overflowing with thousands of galaxies and features some of the faintest objects observed.
Known as Webb’s First Deep Field, it shows the galaxy cluster SMACS 0723, which acts as a gravitational lens, bending light from more distant galaxies behind it towards the observatory, in a cosmic magnification effect.
Launched in December 2021 from French Guiana on an Ariane 5 rocket, Webb is orbiting the Sun at a distance of a million miles (1.6 million kilometres) from Earth, in a region of space called the second Lagrange point.
Here, it remains in a fixed position relative to the Earth and Sun, with minimal fuel required for course corrections.
A wonder of engineering, the total project cost is estimated at $10 billion, making it one of the most expensive scientific platforms ever built, comparable to the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.