James Webb Space Telescope to be featured on stamp

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope will be featured on a new stamp after providing images of parts of the universe never witnessed by humanity before.

The stamp will be first issued on Sept. 8. Preorders of the stamp will be available Aug. 8. The stamp can be purchased in panes of 20 and used for 1-ounce first-class mail.

“The image on the stamp is an artist’s digitally created depiction of the telescope against a dazzling starscape,” the U.S. Postal Service said in a press release. “The selvage image of a star and distant space was taken by the telescope early in its mission, brilliantly confirming the perfect alignment of the telescope’s 18 mirror segments.”

The telescope has allowed scientists to examine galaxies up to 13.1 billion light-years away. The telescope’s spectrograph permits NASA to explore galaxies’ chemical composition.

The Webb telescope will replace the Hubble telescope as NASA’s primary view of deep space.

NASA released the first set of images from the telescope on July 12.

By Justin Boggs, Scripps National.