It was a giddy Tuesday morning at NASA'S Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. At one point NASA Administrator Bill Nelson even joked that the mood was more akin to a pep rally than a stuffy scientific press conference.
Yet the joy was not misplaced. Long-awaited images produced by the groundbreaking James Webb Space Telescope were finally going to be revealed to the public. The five images ran the astronomical gamut: one was an image of some of the oldest and most distant objects in the universe; another was not a literal image, but observational data revealing the composition of the atmosphere of a planet in an alien solar system around 1000 light-years away.
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