NASA scientists have provided a tantalising glimpse into the awe-inspiring images the James Webb Space Telescope is set to reveal next week.

The team behind the space observatory said the test image has a “rough-around-the-edges” quality, but is still “among the deepest images of the universe ever taken”.

A successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is the largest and most powerful space observatory ever built. Its mission is to solve mysteries in the solar system, look to distant worlds around other stars and probe the mysterious structures and origins of our universe.

The first fully formed pictures are set to release on 12 July, but NASA shared an engineering test photo that consists of 72 exposures over 32 hours. The teaser image was not optimised to be a science observation, but still hints at the power of the telescope, showing a distant set of galaxies.

The image was captured by Webb’s Fine Guidance Sensor (FGS), which enables accurate science measurements and imaging with precision pointing.

Talk about an overachiever!

Gaze at this test image — an unexpected & deep view of the universe — captured by Webb’s Fine Guidance Sensor (FGS) in May. Built by @csa_asc to point Webb precisely at targets, taking glamour shots isn’t even FGS’s main job: https://t.co/aQUAFHcNV5 pic.twitter.com/uYoh4t8PX2

— NASA Webb Telescope (@NASAWebb) July 6, 2022

Thanks to a week-long stability test in May, scientists were able to keep the imagery from the sensor thanks to available data transfer bandwidth.

NASA said there are a few features that are quite different than the full-resolution images that will be released next week.

Program scientist for the FGS, Neil Rowlands, said he was “thrilled” to clearly see he detailed structure in the galaxies from the image.

“Given what we now know is possible with deep broad-band guider images, perhaps such images, taken in parallel with other observations where feasible, could prove scientifically useful in the future,” Rowlands said.

The goal of the engineering test was to lock onto one star and to test how well Webb could control its roll. NASA said the successful test also produced an image that sparks the imagination of scientists who will be analysing the JWST data.

“The faintest blobs in this image are exactly the types of faint galaxies that Webb will study in its first year of science operations,” said JWST operations scientist Jane Rigby.

The FGS is the one instrument that will be used in every single observation over the course of JWST’s lifetime. It will play a vital role in guiding each Webb observation to its target and maintaining precision to produce breakthrough discoveries about the universe.

Due to the vast amounts of expected data, AI is expected to play an important role in analysing the received images. A machine learning model called Morpheus will be used to detect and classify galaxies in deep space, to help map the earliest structures in the universe.

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