11/18/2023 0 Comments Webb space telescope nearperfect focusHidden behind a big sunshield, Webb’s optics and instruments will soon cool to about -230C (some sections of the telescope are already there). We’ll set them up in a similar way, and then fire the thruster. They’ll be doing those every 20 days or so with the trajectory calculations provided by our flight dynamics team. “The flight operations team is preparing routine station-keeping burns. “L2 is pseudo-stable,” said Jean-Paul Pinaud, who leads the Northrop engineers that keep Webb on track. Webb will now circle L2, keeping the Earth and the Sun in a near-straight line. “Seeing” in the infrared will allow the telescope to, for example, look through dust to image stars that would otherwise be obscured. Infrared light has waves that are just longer than those of visible light. It’s designed to view the cosmos in infrared light and must maintain therefore constant super-cold conditions for its hardware. The other advantage is that Webb will not experience at L2 the big swings in temperature and light endured by space telescopes positioned much closer to Earth. The Lagrange Point 2 is one of five gravitational “sweet-spots” around the Sun and Earth where satellites can hold their position with few orbital adjustments, thus conserving fuel. Even so, two course correction burns were necessary, with the third on Monday tipping Webb into its planned parking position. Its overarching goals are to take pictures of the very first stars to shine in the Universe and to probe far-off planets to see if they might be habitable.Įurope’s Ariane-5 gave the new observatory a near-perfect trajectory and velocity to get it out to L2. Webb, billed as the successor to the famous Hubble Space Telescope, was launched on 25 December by an Ariane-5 rocket from French Guiana. “We do this using the science images, which is why we need to get the science instruments activated and checked out with some initial calibration work,” he told BBC News. “There’s a pretty intensive effort to take all of those 18 segments from their current state and get them to act as one big mirror, and also to get the secondary mirror into its optimised condition,” explained Charlie Atkinson, the chief engineer on Webb at Northrop Grumman, the American aerospace company that co-led the telescope’s development with the US space agency (NASA). Key tasks include switching on the observatory’s four instruments, and also focusing its mirrors - in particular, its 6.5m-wide segmented primary reflector. Webb was finally nudged into an orbit around this location thanks to a short, five-minute thruster burn.Ĭontrollers back on Earth will now spend the coming months tuning the telescope to get it ready for science. The Lagrange Point 2, as it’s known, is a million miles (1.5 million km) from Earth on its nightside. Thirty days after it was launched, the James Webb telescope has arrived at the position in space where it will observe the Universe.
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