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The James Webb Space Telescope has fully deployed all its elements

Artist’s impression of the fully-deployed James Webb Space Telescope, with the silver sunshield and the gold primary mirror clearly visible

Artist’s impression of the fully-deployed James Webb Space Telescope, with the silver sunshield and the gold primary mirror clearly visible

Photo by Nasa

10th January 2022

By: Rebecca Campbell

Creamer Media Senior Deputy Editor

     

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The US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa) and the European Space Agency (ESA) both announced on Saturday that the James Webb Space Telescope had completed the deployment of all its elements. The telescope had to be folded up in order to fit into the nose fairing of its Ariane 5 launch rocket. The instrument is a joint endeavour of Nasa, ESA and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA).

The deployment process took more than a week, and included the deployment of the telescope’s five-layer sun shield, essential to allow the instrument to maintain the very low temperatures – less than 50 ° K – it requires to operate. (On the Kelvin temperature scale, represented by K, 0 ° is absolute zero. There are no minus temperatures on the Kelvin scale.) The process culminated in the deployment of the spacecraft’s 6.4 m gold-plated primary mirror.

“[Saturday], Nasa achieved another engineering milestone decades in the making,” enthused Nasa administrator Bill Nelson. “While the journey is not complete, I join the Webb team in breathing a little easier and imagining the future breakthroughs bound to inspire the world. The James Webb Space Telescope is an unprecedented mission that is on the precipice of seeing the light from the first galaxies and discovering the mysteries of our universe. Each feat already achieved and future accomplishment is a testament to the thousands of innovators who poured their life’s passion into this mission.”

“The successful unfolding of the Webb telescope has been a complex but impressive engineering masterpiece,” highlighted ESA director-general Josef Aschbacher. “On behalf of ESA, I want to sincerely congratulate our colleagues at Nasa for this achievement. Webb is an international partnership led by Nasa, where ESA is providing key contributions in the form of instruments, science teams and, very importantly, a successful launch on Christmas Day from the European Spaceport in Kourou [French Guiana]. I am grateful to Nasa, CSA and our European team including [French space agency] CNES, [space launch company] Arianespace and ArianeGroup for this excellent cooperation.”

The primary mirror is composed of 18 mirror segments. These now have to be aligned into position, which will be done using 126 actuators mounted on the back of the mirror segments. This process is expected to take months. Once this has been done, the telescope’s science instruments will be calibrated. After that, the telescope will take its first images. These are expected to be received during this coming northern summer.

Meanwhile, the spacecraft will soon execute its third mid-course correction burn (that is, fire its engine). These course correction burns are necessary to precisely place it in its target orbit, which is around what is called the second Lagrange point (known as L2 for short). At a Lagrange point a small mass, such as a spacecraft, can orbit in a constant pattern with the two large masses whose gravitational interaction creates the Lagrange point (in this case, the masses are the Earth and the Moon). The telescope’s orbit of L2 is 1.5-million kilometres from the Earth.

The James Webb is the most powerful space telescope ever launched. It is designed to detect celestial objects at ranges of more than 13.5-billion light years (or, to phrase it differently, look 13.5-billion years back in time). It will do so by capturing infrared light from such bodies, with a much greater resolution than previously possible.

Edited by Creamer Media Reporter

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