Nasa begin months-long effort to focus James Webb space telescope

The process of bringing the James Webb space telescope into focus will take months and will be finished in time for the revolutionary eye in the sky to begin peering into the cosmos by early summer.

Mission control engineers at Nasa's Goddard space flight centre in Greenbelt, Maryland, began by sending their initial commands to tiny motors that slowly position and fine- tune the telescope's principal mirror.

The telescope mirrors are unfolding in real time.

The primary mirror is larger than the Hubble telescope and consists of 18 hexagonal segments of gold-plated beryllium metal.

The 18 segments, which had been folded together to fit inside the cargo bay of the rocket that carried the telescope to space, were unfurled with the rest of its structural components.

The segments have to be detached from the bolts that held them in place for the launch and then moved forward by about a centimetre to form a single, unified, light-collecting surface.

The alignment will take three months, according to Lee Feinberg.

Feinberg said that aligning the primary mirror segments to form one large mirror means each segment is aligned to one-five thousandth the thickness of a human hair.

He said that it required them to invent things that had never been done before, such as the actuators, which were built to move in the vacuum of space.

As part of a cohesive optical system, the secondary mirror must be aligned to direct light from the primary lens into the instruments.

Feinberg said that the telescope should be ready to capture its first science images in May, and that they would be processed over a month before they can be released to the public.

The $9 billion telescope will be able to see the universe through the eyes of stars in the clouds of gas and dust. Hubble has operated at both the visible and visible-light levels.

The power of the telescope allows it to observe objects at greater distances than Hubble or any other telescope.

This will bring into view a glimpse of the universe that has never been seen before, because of the point at which the universe began to expand.

The European and Canadian space agencies collaborated with Nasa on a telescope.