The telescope will be ready to share its first beautiful image of space this summer, but the work to get it ready to collect science data is still underway. Engineers have been working on aligning the telescope's primary and secondary mirrors for a long time.
Engineers shared an image array with 18 points of light. 18 images of the same star, bright star HD 84406, were used for the alignment process, which represent the 18 segments that make up the primary mirror. The star reflected the overall shape of the mirror. The next step was to make small adjustments to the mirror segments and the secondary mirror so that the 18 points of light were sharper. The new image was shared by NASA engineers.
The team could move on to image stacking, in which the 18 points were stacked on top of each other to create a single point of light. It doesn't mean that adjustments are complete, as the mirror is now operating as one large mirror rather than 18 small mirrors. The team still needs to make small adjustments in a phase called coarse phasing, in which different pairs of segments will be matched up to correct for small differences between them.
Lee Feinberg, optical telescope element manager for NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, said that they are increasingly pleased with the results they are seeing.
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