NASA has begun the process of bringing a New space telescope into focus, The James Webb Space Telescope has been packed for launch at the launch site in Corfu, French Guiana, in an unaltered photo of Northrop Grumman Space Park in Redondo Beach, California. Handout via NASA / Chris Gunn / Reuters
 |
| NASA has begun |
(Reuters) - NASA on Wednesday embarked on a difficult, month-long process to focus on the newly launched James Webb Space Telescope, a mission to begin looking into the cosmic eye of the revolutionary eye in time. . . Early summer
Mission control engineers at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, began sending their initial commands to so-called aquaters that gradually set and adjusted the telescope's main mirror.
The primary mirror is made of 18 hexagonal pieces of gold-plated beryllium metal, and is 21 feet 4 inches (6.5 m) in diameter - a light-assembling surface much larger than its predecessor, the 30-year-old Hubble Space Telescope.
The telescope was folded together to fit inside the cargo bogie of the space rocket, with eighteen sections folded together with its remaining structural elements over a two-week period after the web's December 3 launch. 25
These sections now need to be separated from the fasteners that hold them in place for release and then proceed half an inch from their original structure - a 10-day process - before aligning to create a single uninterrupted light-assembly surface.
The alignment will take an additional three months, Lee Feinberg, director of Goddard's Web Optical Telescope Element, told Reuters by phone.
By aligning the parts of the primary mirror to form a large mirror, Feinberg said that this means that each part is "consistent with the one-five-thousandth thickness of human hair".
"For all this, we need to discover things that have not been done before," he said, adding that engines are designed to move increasingly in space -400 Fahrenheit (-240 Celsius).
The telescope's small secondary mirrors, designed to point the light collected from the primary lens to a webcam and other instruments, must also be aligned to act as part of a coherent optical system.
If all goes according to plan, Feinberg says the telescope should be ready to take its first science images in May, which will be processed for about another month before being released to the public.
The $ 9 billion telescope, billed by NASA as the premier space science observatory for the next decade, will essentially display the universe in an infrared spectrum, allowing it to see the birth of stars through clouds of gas and dust. Hubble worked primarily on optical and ultraviolet wavelengths.
The web is about 100 times more powerful than the Hubble, enabling it to observe objects at greater distances, and therefore much more than the Hubble or any other telescope.
Astronomers say it will give a glimpse of a universe never seen before - just 100 million years after the Big Bang, the theoretical flashpoint that led to the expansion of the visible universe approximately 13.8 billion years ago.
The telescope is an international partnership led by NASA in partnership with European and Canadian space agencies. Northrop Grumman (NOC.N) was the main contractor.
