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Fully Aligned and Ready to Observe Our Universe

aligned

The big moment everyone’s been waiting for has finally arrived. The James Webb Space Telescope is “fully aligned” and “ready to observe the universe.” Everyone can finally breathe normally again because all the gear works flawlessly. It will be a while before the official snapshots start streaming out though.

Aligned and ready to go

The James Webb Space Telescope features a massive, gold plated mirror made up of 18 separate segments that give it the capacity to peer off into the most distant reaches of space, almost all the way to the big bang.

According to the NASA Webb team, the observation platform is now “completely aligned.

That’s a miracle considering that the whole thing had to be packed up for shipping inside a standard size rocket. All on it’s own, the equipment had to unfold and assemble itself into the final configuration a million miles from Earth.

Once unfolded and positioned, each segment had to be aligned separately, and also to work together as one.

The $10 billion price tag should be cheap, compared to the priceless images expected in coming decades. The freshly aligned telescope will soon tell us what’s inside the atmospheres of exoplanets.

By chance, it already imaged some of the oldest galaxies ever detected, and that was simply in the background of the first test image.

Invisible infrared light

The reason for the gold coating on the mirrors is because Webb uses infrared light, “which is invisible to the human eye.” Now that the mirror segments are aligned, some of the onboard instruments still need calibrated.

The first “high-resolution images Webb collects of the cosmos” are due around the end of June. The tests continue to come out better than expected.

On Thursday, April 28, NASA made public some sample shots which “show the clear, well-focused images that the observatory’s four instruments are capable of capturing.

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Taken as a composite, “these images share the telescope’s full field of view.” Webb’s newly aligned mirrors “are directing focused light from space into each instrument and those instruments are capturing images.

In this test run, after all 18 mirrors were perfectly aligned, Webb focused in on “a small neighboring satellite galaxy called the Large Magellanic Cloud,” known for a dense field of stars.

These images are already remarkable because they “demonstrate what people across countries and continents can achieve when there is a bold scientific vision to explore the universe.


What do you think?

Written by Mark Megahan

Mark Megahan is a resident of Morristown, Arizona and aficionado of the finer things in life.

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