![]() ![]() "I took one look at these data, and I said, 'We are dropping everything else!'" said Shardha Jogee, professor of astronomy at The University of Texas at Austin. In a Hubble image, one galaxy, EGS-23205, is little more than a disk-shaped smudge, but in the corresponding JWST image taken this past summer, it's a beautiful spiral galaxy with a clear stellar bar. Northrop Grumman Corp (NOC.N) was the primary contractor.Prior to JWST, images from the Hubble Space Telescope had never detected bars at such young epochs. The telescope is an international collaboration led by NASA in partnership with the European and Canadian space agencies. Webb is about 100 times more powerful than Hubble, enabling it to observe objects at greater distances, thus farther back in time, than Hubble or any other telescope.Īstronomers say this will bring into view a glimpse of the cosmos never previously seen - dating to just 100 million years after the Big Bang, the theoretical flashpoint that set in motion the expansion of the observable universe an estimated 13.8 billion years ago. Hubble has operated primarily at optical and ultraviolet wavelengths. The $9-billion telescope, described by NASA as the premier space-science observatory of the next decade, will mainly view the cosmos in the infrared spectrum, allowing it to gaze through clouds of gas and dust where stars are being born. If all goes as planned, the telescope should be ready to capture its first science images in May, which would be processed over about another month before they can be released to the public, Feinberg said. The telescope's smaller, secondary mirror, designed to direct light collected from the primary lens into Webb's camera and other instruments, must also be aligned to operate as part of a cohesive optical system. "All of this required us to invent things that had never been done before," such as the actuators, which were built to move incrementally at minus 400 Fahrenheit (minus 240 Celsius) in the vacuum of space, he added. NASA/Chris Gunn/Handout via REUTERSĪligning the primary mirror segments to form one large mirror means each segment "is aligned to one-five-thousandth the thickness of a human hair", Feinberg said. The James Webb Space Telescope is packed up for shipment to its launch site in Kourou, French Guiana in an undated photograph at Northrop Grumman's Space Park in Redondo Beach, California. The alignment will take an additional three months, Lee Feinberg, the Webb optical telescope element manager at Goddard, told Reuters by telephone. Those segments must now be detached from fasteners that held them in place for the launch and then moved forward half an inch from their original configuration - a 10-day process - before they can be aligned to form a single, unbroken, light-collecting surface. The 18 segments, which had been folded together to fit inside the cargo bay of the rocket that carried the telescope to space, were unfurled with the rest of its structural components during a two-week period following Webb's launch on Dec. Mission control engineers at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore began by sending their initial commands to tiny motors called actuators that slowly position and fine-tune the telescope's principal mirror.Ĭonsisting of 18 hexagonal segments of gold-plated beryllium metal, the primary mirror measures 21 feet 4 inches (6.5 m) in diameter - a much larger light-collecting surface than Webb's predecessor, the 30-year-old Hubble Space Telescope. ![]() NASA on Wednesday embarked on a months-long, painstaking process of bringing its newly launched James Webb Space Telescope into focus, a task due for completion in time for the revolutionary eye in the sky to begin peering into the cosmos by early summer. Jan 12 (Reuters) - (This Jan 12 story corrects the location of mission operations center in paragraph 2 to Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, instead of Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland)
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