NASA's James Webb Space Telescope team wins Wernher von Braun award

May 2 (UPI) -- The NASA team behind the James Webb Space Telescope has been awarded the Wernher von Braun Memorial Award by the National Space Society.

The award is given every two years and was first proposed in 1992.

James Webb program scientist, Eric Smith, accepted the award on behalf of the team.

"On behalf of NASA's James Webb Space Telescope team, we are honored by this prestigious award," said Smith.

"Webb has exceeded all expectations and captured awe-inspiring images and amazing spectra of the distant universe, objects in our solar system and everything in between that will inspire generations to come," he continued.

The James Webb, which was launched in 2021, is designed to observe invisible light spectrums with its 18 hexagonal mirrors which form a 21-foot-wide light-collecting area.

"Webb operates at infrared frequencies. The combination of sensitive instrumentation with its massive primary mirror the telescope can see farther and more clearly than any previous observatory of its kind," NASA said in a press release Tuesday.

The telescope's stand-out feature is the ability to observe exoplanets orbiting distant stars.

The telescope is so powerful that it can observe light from 13.5 billion years ago, which researchers hope will offer insight into the big bang and the formation of the earliest stars.

Unlike most spacecraft, the James Webb Telescope does not orbit the Earth but instead orbits the Sun at a distance of approximately one million miles from our planet.

In July, NASA released the first set of ten images from the James Webb. The images included a "deep field" of stars and an exoplanet orbiting a star approximately 1,000 light years from Earth. Astonishingly, the telescope was able to capture evidence of clouds in the distant planet's atmosphere.

"For the first time, we've detected evidence of clouds in this exoplanet's atmosphere," NASA said at the time.

Additionally, NASA released an image of a nebula formed by a dying star.