NASA's James Webb Telescope has finished its mirror alignment procedure and is now fully focused, allowing it to capture a stunning image of a field of stars amid its mission to uncover more of our universe.
The achievement comes after the space agency released an image in mid-March that demonstrated the amazing photographs that the telescope could take using its primary mirror. The instrument's capabilities reached a point where it focused light as finely as physics would allow for hardware of its size.
James Webb Telescope
While being a critical milestone, it was only one of the five instruments that the telescope carried to observe the universe. The completion of the alignment procedure means it has placed all of its instruments in equal focus.
The telescope's instruments include two spectrographs, two imaging cameras, and a fine guidance sensor that helps with pointing itself towards the cosmos. Each of the instruments has to be individually aligned to the primary mirror to ensure focus. The process has taken NASA several weeks, as per ArsTechnica.
The James Webb Telescope is a combined effort between NASA, the Canadian Space Agency, and the European Space Agency. It has become humanity's newest attempt at unlocking the secrets of the universe. The telescope aims to collect data on potentially habitable exoplanets and observe distant stars and fledgling galaxies in infrared using its golden honeycomb array.
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Webb optical telescope element manager at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Lee Feinberg, said in a blog post by the space agency that the remarkable test images following the successful full alignment of the telescope demonstrated humans' bold scientific vision to explore the universe.
According to Gizmodo, the telescope is now moving into the process of instrument commissioning, which is where the incredibly sensitive instruments will be tested across different configurations. This is to ensure that they are ready for full-scale operation in the future. The telescope will point at different patches of the sky to ensure that it is thermally stable as part of this process.
Stunning Images
NASA's experts estimate that the process of instrument commissioning could take roughly two months. The official start of the science mission that the James Webb Telescope is a part of is expected to finally begin this summer.
Webb, which is considered to be the most ambitious and complex space science telescope that was ever created by humans, has a massive 6.5-meter primary mirror. It observes the cosmos roughly a million miles away from our planet. However, it is capable of seeing light from the first stars and the earliest galaxies.
The first images that the telescope captured after the alignment process were 10 photographs released to the public showing the Large Magellanic Cloud (MLC). It is a small satellite galaxy of the Milky Way that can be seen by the naked eye from the southern hemisphere.
Webb wavefront sensing and controls scientist, Scott Acton, said that the images profoundly changed the way that he saw the universe. He said our planet was surrounded by a "symphony of creation," noting that there were galaxies everywhere, Forbes reported.
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