The work on the James Webb Space Telescope is just beginning.
The final mirror segment of the largest space telescope ever built was unfolded on Saturday to cap a complicated deployment in space. The mission team is getting key parts of the observatory online for its astronomy work, while directing the telescope to its final destination.
It is expected to arrive at its "insertion location" by January 23rd, where it will be put in place to fire its engines to glide to a "parking spot" about a million miles away from our planet. Thanks to a perfect alignment with the sun, Earth and moon, a minimum of fuel can be used to stay in place.
Control teams will need to execute maneuvers in other areas. NASA pointed to aligning its mirror and getting its instruments ready as key to watch for in the next few weeks, as they still have a lot of complex operations ahead.
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The James Webb Space Telescope works in pictures.
The engineering team for NASA's James Webb Space Telescope celebrates at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimor, Maryland as the observatory completed unfolding its primary mirror on January 8, 2022. The image is from NASA/Bill Ingalls.
John Durning, the deputy project manager at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, told reporters Saturday that the team members will spend the next 15 days aligning the mirror segments to perform as one mirror.
Durning said that the instruments would start turning on in the next week or so. "After we get into L2, the engineers are going to start turning on the various instruments."
L2 is an ideal location for work to be done. Thanks to the great distance from the sun and a sun shield, Webb will be able to work in the dark. The telescope will be able to peer through the dust to look at objects that are younger than the sun, as it tries to understand the universe and its evolution.
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The four science instruments that will enable observations in visible, near-IR and mid-IR are a near-IR camera, a near-IR spectrograph, a mid-IR instrument and a fine guidance sensor.
Each instrument has a set of goals. It will be difficult to align them once they reach temperature.
Lee Feinberg, the optical telescope element manager at Goddard, said in the press conference that the deployment of the mirror will start on Tuesday. It will take between 10 and 12 days to get all of the mirrors to be in a position where we can do the detailed optical alignment, Feinberg said.
When the telescope takes its first testing image as part of the alignment process, it will take about three months for them to be ready for the first light. The telescope has not been fully aligned yet, so the first images will most likely be blurry. It will take more testing to get the configuration right.
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An animation shows the trajectory of the James Webb Space Telescope. The image is from NASA.
"We think the entire telescope will be aligned around day 120, depending on how the process goes," Durning said, which would put the full alignment date around April 24, depending on how the process goes.
The various instrument team partners will be turning on different instruments and using them to align the telescope and further refine it.
The Hubble Space Telescope had to be corrected due to an engineering fault after it launched in 1990 due to blurry images. Hubble can be used by astronauts on the space shuttle for repairs. It will be too far away for such work to be done through remote operations.
"We start with the mirrors off by a millimeter and then we drive them to be aligned to less than the size of a coronaviruses, to tens of nanometers," Jane Rigby told reporters.
It's a very deliberate process that takes a long time. The telescope is not ready out of the box. The first images will be ugly. It's going to be blurry. We have to drive 18 images all over the sky into a telescope.
"I like to think of it as if we have 18 mirrors that are all doing their own thing, singing their own tune and whatever key they're in, and little donnas doing their own thing, too." "We have to make them work like a chorus, and that is a methodical, laborious process."
The team plans to show the telescope's capabilities in a set of "WOW images". The goal of the first pictures will be to showcase all four science instruments and to really knock everybody's socks off.
During the press conference, officials said that the first images will include stars to check for precise alignment and the Large Magellanic Cloud to assess the telescope's ability to render shades of luminosity, or inherent brightness.
A set of six categories of work ranging from planet formation to stellar physics will be included in a five-month science operations period after the project is commissioned.
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