The question of what will the huge observatory look at first is burning in the astronomy community as the James Webb Space Telescope begins the lengthy process of aligning its 18 primary mirror segments.
After a successful launch on December 25th, and a successful deployment about two weeks later, the Earth-sun Lagrange Point 2 (L2), a spot in space about 930,000 miles away from our planet, was the final destination for the space probe.
18 hexagonal mirror segments need to be gradually aligned into a single, nearly perfect light-collecting surface. Jane Rigby, the operations project scientist, warned people not to expect much from the "first light" of the project, as part of the process of taking images of the sky to see how well the alignment is proceeding.
The first images will be ugly. It will be blurry. "We'll have 18 of these little images all over the sky", Rigby told reporters during a livestreamed press conference on Saturday. The telescope operations are centered at the NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.
NASA's James Webb Space Telescope mission is live.
During the press conference, the team members didn't say if they plan to release the ugly images. The primary mirror segments will be off by a millimeter, which is a large degree of imprecision when it comes to honing in on a distant exoplanet or seeing the stars in a distant galaxy.
Engineers think that the telescope will be seeing far more precisely by April 24, when the alignment procedure is complete.
"I like to think that we have 18 mirrors that are, right now, little donnas, all doing their own thing, singing their own tune in whatever key they're in," he said. "We have to make them work like a chorus, and that is a methodical, laborious process."
The next question is what will be the focus of the attention. The vast majority of telescope requests were turned down by the observatory, which is billed as a successor to the Hubble Space Telescope. There are a few "early science" programs listed on NASA's website, but they have not been disclosed.
We know some of the engineering alignment targets that the observatory will look at.
"We have some sources that are nice and uniform brightness, so we can check how the detectors are working," he said. We can always see the north and south ecliptic poles in the Large Magellanic Cloud. They're always available.
The team chose the Large Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy relatively close to the Milky Way, because they would always be seen no matter what happened. If the launch date changed, she said, they didn't have to keep replanning.
The consistency was a wise choice, as the launch date was repeatedly delayed due to last-minute issues, including a faulty data cable and an unforeseen release of a band. All issues were resolved before the launch.
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