Berkeley astronomers to put new space telescope through its paces

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By Robert Sanders, UC Berkeley News. 

Excerpt: ...Following the six-month-long commissioning phase, 13 teams chosen by NASA will take the new [James Webb Space] telescope [JWST] for a spin, putting its instruments through their paces by targeting astronomical objects that will be the major focus of scientists during the telescope’s planned 10 years of operation, and probably much longer. “To have two of the 13 led by people at Berkeley was pretty exceptional,” said [Imke] de Pater, a Distinguished Professor of the Graduate School and Distinguished Professor Emerita of astronomy and earth and planetary science who wrote her proposal in 2017 before her retirement from teaching last year. Given the JWST’s primary mission to study dim, distant galaxies and faint exoplanets, the observations planned by de Pater and her team of about 50 astronomers may seem out of character: They will turn the telescope on one of the brightest objects in the sky, Jupiter.…

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