The James Webb Space Telescope has taken one giant step closer in its mission to unlock the mysteries of the universe.

The world’s premier space observatory has successfully completed a number of steps crucial for aligning its 18 gold mirror segments. Having checked this milestone off of Webb’s list, the telescope team expects that the observatory may even exceed the goals it was meant to achieve.

Webb will be able to peer inside the atmospheres of exoplanets and observe some of the first galaxies created after the universe began by observing them through infrared light, which is invisible to the human eye.

The James Webb Space Telescope’s revolutionary technology will study every phase of cosmic history—from within our solar system to the most distant observable galaxies in the early universe. We’ll present an overview of the telescope, its mission and the some of the science it hopes to reveal. Tune in via our Facebook page for this live virtual presentation presented by Jason T. Archer. No registration required.

While it’s an exciting discovery, it falls short of demonstrating that carbon-based lifeforms once lived on the surface of the Red Planet. It is, however, a step in that direction.

“This experiment was definitely successful,” Maëva Millan, postdoctoral fellow at NASA’s Goddard Spaceflight Center and lead author of a new study published on Monday in the journal Nature Astronomy, told Inverse.

“While we haven’t found what we were looking for, biosignatures, we showed that this technique is really promising,” she added.

Engineers align the mirrors of the $10bn observatory to produce a pin-sharp image of a star.

Asteroid 2022 EB5 was too small to pose a hazard to Earth, but its discovery marks the fifth time that any asteroid has been observed before impacting into the atmosphere.

In the night sky for March of 2022, only stars and the Moon, not planets, will greet you. The real show, however, arrives just before dawn.

Russia’s space agency Roscosmos said it will bring a US astronaut back to Earth from the International Space Station at the end of this month, despite tensions between the two countries.

NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei will return as planned on March 30 together with cosmonauts Anton Shkaplerov and Pyotr Dubrov in a Russian Soyuz space capsule, the agency said in Moscow on Monday.

“Roscosmos has never given partners any reason to doubt our reliability,” the agency said, adding that the safe operation of the space station is its top priority.

Little did he know that we would one day have telescopes powerful enough to image distant galaxies.

“[Einstein] had a sense of the natural sublime.”

The first known image of an Einstein ring was captured in 1987 at the Very Large Array radio observatory in New Mexico. A little over a decade later, Hubble found the first complete one. Since then astronomers have found many more of Einstein Rings including this one, which Tommaso Treu’s group in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Californa, Los Angeles, produced with the Hubble.