In mid-July, the James Webb Space Telescope will deliver "amazing colour photographs" of the cosmos.

NASA, along with its partners the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA), organised a committee to create a prioritised list of objects, which they are now working into telescope.

According to Pontoppidan, Webb's team has already released a series of star field images acquired for calibration purposes, but the new photographs will be of astrophysics targets, which are critical to furthering humanity's understanding of the cosmos.

The universe's expansion has stretched the visible and ultraviolet light generated by the very earliest bright objects, resulting in infrared, which Webb is designed to detect with remarkable clarity, giving it an unprecedented view of the first stars and galaxies that formed 13.5 billion years ago.

Webb is anticipated to cost NASA over $10 billion, making it one of the most expensive scientific platforms ever created, similar to CERN's Large Hadron Collider and Hubble's predecessor.

"We'd really like it to be a surprise," Klaus Pontoppidan, a scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, told reporters, explaining that the secrecy stemmed in part from the fact that the first targets had not yet been finalised.

The 18 hexagonal mirror segments of the James Webb Orbit Telescope (JWST), the most powerful observatory ever carried to space, are approximately halfway aligned, according to scientists. According to NASA, the scientists have completed the second and third phases of mirror alignment, out of a total of seven.

The subsequent stages, according to NASA, will entail even more minute changes in order to capture an image of a faraway star as a single, accurate point. Even though the completed stages focus all of a star's light into the Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam), the mirror segments continue to function as 18 small telescopes rather than a single lens.

The fourth phase of mirror alignment, known as coarse phasing, has already begun for scientists. Engineers will be able to adjust slight height variations between mirror parts using this method.

Last Christmas, James Webb was launched into space from French Guiana. The major goal of the James Webb Space Telescope is to solve the puzzle of the Universe's origin almost 14 billion years ago.

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