NEW ADDITIONS — In a post on the Webb Telescope's blog on Friday, NASA announced that the operations team on Earth has completed the sixth stage of Webb's commissioning process. They're now ready to go on to the seventh and final step of preparing the telescope for science — once the equipment has cooled to operational temperatures.
Webb is already slightly ahead of schedule, according to Ball Aerospace scientist and Webb project member Chand Walker, who says the efficiency was a welcome surprise.
"The commissioning procedure, in general, begins with broad corrections and progresses to fine corrections." "However, the early secondary mirror coarse corrections were so good that the fine corrections in Phase Six's initial iteration were superfluous," Walker explains.
"This success was the result of years of planning and excellent coordination among the wavefront sensing team," she adds.
WHY DOES IT MATTER? To reach this point, the Webb Telescope team spent weeks painstakingly modifying the telescope's primary mirror's 18 gold and beryllium segments to bring them into alignment (in focus) across numerous different instruments on Webb. These are the following:
The Near-Infrared Camera is a device that captures images in the near-infrared
The Sensor for Fine Guidance
Slit less Near-Infrared Spectrograph
The Near-Infrared Spectrometer is a device that detects heat in the near-infrared spectrum
According to NASA, this process worked so well — for both the primary and secondary mirrors — that some of the adjustments the crew had planned for didn't need to be made in the end.
"Previous alignment attempts were so accurate that the team concluded no additional adjustments for Webb's secondary mirror until the seventh stage," the NASA Webb team says on Twitter.
So, what do we have to look forward to now? The final equipment to be aligned is the Mid-Infrared Instrument MIRI. For typical operations, MIRI must drop to a bone-chilling minus 447 degrees Fahrenheit (7 Kelvin). Even in the frigid darkness of space, that process will take weeks.
WHAT'S NEXT FOR WEBB – Once MIRI has cooled down, it will enter its seventh commissioning stage. This is the last step before the instruments are completely operational and the Webb is used to capture some of the most precise and sharp views of the universe ever created.
On December 25, 2021, the James Webb Space Telescope was launched into space. NASA, the European Space Agency, and other international space science institute collaborated on the project. In comparison to a telescope that functions in the visible light spectrum, such as the Hubble Space Telescope, the Webb is meant to gaze at the universe in infrared wavelengths of light, allowing it to view very far into the distant universe.
Webb is still on plan to launch in the summer of 2022, according to NASA, when the first scientific observations from the spacecraft will be available. These should be good, based on the engineering photographs it has provided thus far, which include this gorgeous stellar image with a little galaxy glitter tossed in for good measure.
Small tweaks provide big results!
We've validated that the James Webb Space Telescope's optical performance will be able to meet or exceed the science goals the telescope was meant to fulfill after completing two more mirror alignment phases!
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