Spacecraft Captures Remarkable Image of James Webb Space Telescope

The next-gen James Webb Space Telescope launched in late 2021 and is getting ready to peel back the secrets of the early universe. It will be doing that work from 1 million miles away from Earth, which is why it's so impressive that another spacecraft was able to snap a picture of Webb out in its distant orbit. Webb is a joint project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency.

On Wednesday, ESA released an image of Webb as seen by the Gaia observatory, a spacecraft that's busy making a detailed 3D map of our galaxy. Both spacecraft are in orbit around what's called Lagrange point 2 (L2), which gave Gaia a shot at seeing Webb in its field of vision.

Webb appears as a dot in the Gaia image. "On 18 February 2022, the two spacecraft were 1 million km [about 620,000 miles] apart, with an edge-on view of Gaia towards Webb's huge sunshield," ESA said in a statement. "Very little reflected sunlight came Gaia's way, and Webb therefore appears as a tiny, faint spec of light in Gaia's two telescopes without any details visible."

Gaia's main job is to record the position and motion of objects in space rather than snap direct pictures, but its sky mapper instrument was able to capture Webb.

Unlike some other space missions, including NASA's Mars rovers and China's Tianwen-1 Mars orbiter, Webb isn't equipped with gear designed to take selfies, though we did receive a surprise selfie-of-sorts of its primary mirror in February. That makes Gaia's accomplishment all the more special. Said ESA, "Gaia now has a spacecraft friend at L2, and together they will uncover our home galaxy, and the universe beyond."