The most powerful space telescope ever was launched and it just reached its permanent address. The James Webb Space Telescope is now at a distance of 1.5 million miles from Earth.
Around 2 p.m. Ground operators guided the telescope through a final mid-course correction burn to fine- tune it for the science mission.
The "big burn" course correction that was performed with a different thruster on Dec. 25 was for a much more dramatic maneuver and lasted for approximately five minutes.
There are photos of the James Webb Space Telescope.
The second lagrange point, or L2, is where the $10 billion Telescope launched on Dec. 25, 2021, after it blasted off from South America on Earth's sun-facing side. There are five Lagrange Points around Earth and the sun, where the pull of gravity and the force of gravity from the object's path "park" its body in place, according to NASA.
"I see it like a Pringles potato chip in my head," Jane said at the briefing. In the potato chip scenario, Webb is constantly inching up one side of a curved chip and then gently falling back down and traveling up the other side, repeating the movement over and over again for the life of the mission.
In what is known as a halo orbit, it will circle around L2 about once every six months. It will keep the telescope in the same position relative to Earth and the sun, and it will ensure that the sun won't be eclipsed by Earth, which could affect the thermal stability of the instruments and hamper its access to solar power.
According to the NASA briefing, the telescope's operators will fire its thruster about once every 21 days. Even with those small adjustments, the fuel reserves should far exceed the 10-year mission length. It's possible that Webb has enough fuel to keep going for 20 years.
The Hubble Space Telescope is in the same area as the sun. The image was taken by the STSI.
Over the next several months, the telescope will undergo more tests and alignments in preparation for conducting science observations that will target some of the faintest and most distant objects.
Earlier this month, he reached other significant milestones. Live Science sister site Space.com previously reported that on January 1, the telescope unfurled its enormous sun shield, a critical component for keeping its instruments cold as they search for faint signals from the early universe. According to NASA, the giant gold mirror segments unfolded from their launch positions. Engineers will align the telescope's primary mirror by aiming its 18 mirror segments at a bright isolated star, lining up and stacking those images, and then aligning the mirror segments to about 1/3 of a human hair, so that they act as a single mirror.
We called the last 30 days '30 days on the edge' because we were so proud to be through that. We were just setting the table. The best is yet to come, because we were just getting this beautiful spacecraft unfolded and ready to do science.
The Hubble Space Telescope is entering its third decade of capturing spectacular space images from its orbital path around Earth, and will not be the only set of eyes in space. Recent Hubble observations of a dwarf galaxy located 34 million light-years from Earth revealed that black holes may play a part in star formation.
The biggest mirror ever sent to space will allow for unprecedented views of the universe over the course of its mission. NASA says that NASA's James Bond will use the telescope to detect faint signals from the universe's earliest stars and to penetrate the dense dust clouds that shroud the formation of stars and planets.
"Anything we're doing is about getting the observatory ready to dotransformational science, from exploring the atmospheres of planets around other stars to studying the darkest parts of the sky for signs of first- generation galaxies that formed more than 13 billion years ago," he said. The baby hasn't opened its eyes yet, but that's the science we're looking forward to.
It was originally published on Live Science.
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