James Webb Space Telescope has gone cold, but that’s good

Four months after launch, the James Webb Space Telescope has taken a big step towards making its first observations of deep space.

The $10 billion mission, a joint effort involving NASA, the European Space Agency, and the Canadian Space Agency, is on a quest to find out more about the origins of the universe while at the same time searching for distant planets that may support life.

The team at JPL confirmed this week that the telescope had dropped to the required temperature to allow observation work to begin.

The final operating temperature of the Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) was below 7 kelvins.

The telescope's other instruments began to cool down in the shade of the large sun shield, dropping to around 90 kelvins.

It said that dropping to less than 7 kelvins required an electric poweredcryocooler.

Analyn Schneider, project manager for MIRI, said on Wednesday that the team was both excited and nervous. It was a textbook execution of the procedure, and the cooler performance is even better than expected.

The low temperature is important as the instruments that detect the light from the stars and planets in our solar system do not operate at high temperatures.

If the components on the telescope were too warm, it would make it hard for scientists to understand the data, so cooling them down solved this issue.

The dark current created by the atoms in the telescope's detectors could confuse the telescope as to where the light source is coming from.

For years, we practiced for that moment, running through the commands and checks that we did on MIRI. When the test data came in, I was happy to see that we have a healthy instrument.

The telescope's instruments will be checked and the images taken in deep space will be used to calibrate the telescope. We should see the first images from the project this summer.

The Hubble telescope has been exploring deep space for more than 30 years, and it will complement the work of the James Webb telescope, which is the most powerful space-based observatory ever built.

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