![]() And we have lots of them," McCaughrean said. "The detectors on JWST have 2000 by 2000 pixels. The technology has come a long way since Hubble's early years, and the James Webb Space Telescope project has been pushing it further along the way. NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), will orbit the sun 1 million miles (1.5 million kilometers) from Earth. NICMOS, consisting of three infrared detectors, each of which had 256 by 256 pixels, opened the first door for Hubble into the infrared universe. to work on the Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS), the first infrared detector fitted on the Hubble Space Telescope during its second servicing mission in 1997. We had 58 times 62 pixels, and that was 4,000 times more than everybody else had, because they only had one." My PhD thesis was all about the first camera which could take 2D infrared images. ![]() ![]() "In the 1980s, infrared pictures were taken with one detector scanning the sky one pixel at a time," said McCaughrean. McCaughrean, then a PhD student at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, was one of those scientists developing early infrared detectors, a technology that has now reached its culmination in four cutting-edge scientific instruments of the James Webb Space Telescope. These early galaxies do emit visible light, but because of their distance, the wavelength of this light gets stretched into the infrared part of the electromagnetic spectrum by the so-called redshift. Hubble was built to detect visible and ultraviolet light. This missing piece of technology was infrared detectors that would be able to collect the faint light coming from those early stars and galaxies more than 13 billion light-years away. The technology that would eventually enable this observatory, now known as the James Webb Space Telescope (originally called the Next Generation Space Telescope), to see that mythical first light in the universe, had yet to be developed.
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