All the eyes are currently fixed upon the upcoming ventures of the biggest observatory which is on its journey of his lifetime and going to change the dimensions of mankind’s astronomical perspectives. The most powerful space observatory ever built roared into the sky two weeks ago.
It was the most recent of a series of delicate maneuvers with what NASA called 344 “single points of failure” Now the telescope is almost ready for business, although more tense moments are still in its future.
The James Webb Space Telescope completed a final, crucial step around 10:30 a.m. by unfolding the last section of its golden, hexagonal mirrors.
Engineers sent commands to latch those mirrors into place, a step that amounted to it becoming fully deployed, NASA says.
It’s the most powerful telescope ever built, but it’s still a long way from being fully deployed in space, the agency
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope successfully unfolded its final primary mirror segment on Saturday (Jan. 8) The telescope is expected to arrive at its “insertion location” by Jan. 23, putting it in place to fire its engines to glide to a “parking spot” called Earth-sun Lagrange Point 2 (L2) about 930,000 miles (1.5 million kilometres) away from our planet.
Webb still has a lot of complex commissioning operations ahead, and NASA pointed to aligning its mirror and getting its instruments ready as key milestones to watch for in the next few weeks. Infrared wavelengths will allow the telescope to peer through dust to look at objects such as young exoplanets or the interior of distant galaxies.
It will take between 10 and 12 days to “get all of the mirrors forward by roughly half an inch” Initial alignment will take about three months to get the them ready for “first light”, when the telescope will take its first testing image as part of the alignment process. NASA warned those first images will most likely be blurry, since the telescope has not been fully aligned yet.
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