USPS to release Forever Stamp celebrating James Webb Telescope

July 27 (UPI) -- The James Webb Space Telescope will be honored with its own stamp, the U.S. Postal Service announced only weeks after its first full collection of images were released to the public.

In a statement on Tuesday, the USPS said the Forever Stamp featuring the $10 billion telescope will be available to the public from Sept. 8.

The stamp depicts an artist's digital recreation of the telescope against an image of a star and distance space that was captured through its lens early in its mission.

The Postal Service said the stamp is a celebration of "the largest and most complex telescope every deployed in space" that is capable "of peering directly into the early cosmos and studying every phase of cosmic history."

Stamp preorders can be made online beginning Aug. 8, but its first-of-issue event will be held Sept. 8 at the Smithsonian National Postal Museum in Washington, D.C.

The telescope was launched into space on Dec. 25, 2021, with expectations of fulling a five- to 10-year mission photographing some of space's most distant mysteries.

Consisting of 18 hexagonal mirrors that form a 21-foot lens, the telescope has infrared vision that can peer 13.5 billion years into the universe's past.

USPS said that its lens captures faint infrared rays that represent the universe's first accessible starlight.

"Revealed is the universe in its infancy, including galaxy formation," it said. "The Webb Telescope can also analyze exoplanets for potentially life-supporting conditions and provide unprecedentedly high-resolution views of our own solar system."

The announcement came two weeks after NASA unveiled five images taken through the telescope of a deep field of stars, an exoplanet located 1,000 light years from Earth, a galaxy cluster and the Carina Nebula. The collection also contained the first-ever image of a dying star.