(Instead of Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore corrects the location of the Mission Operations Center in paragraph 2 in the Jan. 12 story)
NASA on Wednesday began a months-long, painstaking process of bringing its newly launched James Webb Space Telescope-Gianna-2021-12-25 into focus, a task that is just in time to revolutionize the eye of the sky. is about to be completed. At the beginning of summer the universe begins to peek out.
Mission control engineers at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore began their initial command by sending small motors called actuators that slowly position and reinforce the telescope’s lead mirrors.
Consisting of 18 hexagonal segments of gold-plated beryllium metal, the primary mirror has a diameter of 21 feet 4 inches (6.5 m)—a much larger light-collecting surface than Webb’s predecessor, the 30-year-old Hubble Space Telescope.
During the two-week period following Webb’s launch on December 25, 18 sections, which folded together to fit inside the cargo bay of the rocket carrying the telescope into space, were hoisted along with the rest of its structural components. .
Those segments must now be separated by the fasteners that hold them in place for launch and then move half an inch from their original configuration – a 10-day process – before they can form a single, monolithic, light-collecting be able to create. a surface.
Lee Feinberg, Webb Optical Telescope Element Manager at Goddard, told Reuters by telephone that the alignment would take an additional three months.
Feinberg said that aligning the primary mirror segments to form a larger mirror meant that each segment is “connected to one-fifth-thousandth of the thickness of a human hair”.
“All of this requires us to invent things that have never been done before,” he said, “such as actuators built to grow at minus 400 Fahrenheit (minus 240 Celsius) in the vacuum of space. ” were, he said.
The telescope’s smaller, secondary mirror, which is designed to direct the light collected from the primary lens into Webb’s cameras and other instruments, must also be aligned to operate as part of a cohesive optical system.
If all goes according to plan, the telescope should be ready to capture its first science images in May, which will be processed in about another month before being released to the public, Feinberg said.
The $9 billion telescope described by NASA as the leading space-science observatory of the next decade will observe the universe primarily in the infrared spectrum, allowing it to gaze through clouds of gas and dust where stars are being born. Hubble primarily works on optical and ultraviolet wavelengths.
Webb is about 100 times more powerful than Hubble, which enables it to see objects at greater distances than Hubble or any other telescope, thus premature.
Astronomers say it will provide a glimpse of the universe that has never been seen before – just 100 million years after the Big Bang, the theoretical flashpoint that triggered the expansion of the observable universe an estimated 13.8 billion years ago.
The telescope is an international collaboration led by NASA in partnership with European and Canadian space agencies. Northrop Grumman Corp was the primary contractor.
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