It is really happening. 1.5 million km from Earth, the James Webb Space Telescope has reached its destination. On January 24, 2022, a final 5-minute firing put the JWST in its halo at the Sun-Earth L2 point. The formal process can now begin.
In a January 24 news conference, the manager of the station said that they were excited to announce that the station was officially on.
Since it was launched on December 25th, it has been undergoing a lot of complicated unfolding and deployment. Everything so far has been perfect.
Bill Ochs, the project manager at NASA's Goddard Space Flight, said that the past month had achieved amazing success and was a tribute to all the people who had worked on the project for many years.
The course correction maneuvers and efficient launch of the Ariane 5 rocket have the potential to double the lifespan of the JWST mission, as long as 20 years.
He said that they were very happy with their estimated lifetime and that they used a tiny amount of fuel. Everyone is thrilled by it. The team will review the data and put an exact number on that lifetime over the next few months.
The telescope's position around L2 will need to be adjusted about once every 21 days.
The telescope team will begin the months-long process of calibrating its mirrors and turning on the science instruments.
Lee Feinberg said the 3-month process of aligning the 18 mirror segments will begin in about a week, after the primary near-infrared camera, NIRCam, is cold enough to turn on. The mirrors will be aligned by that instrument.
We will look at a bright, isolated star, and we will get 18 different images, which will all be blurry. We can begin the process of aligning the mirrors with a slow process called phasing.
The mirrors will be aligned to the width of a human hair. HD 84406 is a G-type main sequence star that is a lot like our own Sun.
He said that the star is not visible to the naked eye, but can be seen with binoculars.
There is still a lot of work to be done to get the telescope ready for use.
The baby hasn't even opened its eyes yet, and we're a month in. That's why we're here.
