James Webb Space Telescope Launch Update

The James Webb Space Telescope has unwrapped its sunshield, crossing another important item off of its lengthy and risky deployment to-do list.

After successfully extending its deployable tower assembly (DTA), a structure that connects Webb's two halves, on Thursday (Dec. 29), the telescope had the room to begin the preliminary steps to unfurl its gigantic sunshield. Today (Dec. 30), mission teams completed two major next steps: deploying the James Webb Space Telescope's aft momentum flap and releasing the sunshield's protective membrane cover.

Webb still must unfurl the sunshield, which it will do in the next day or so by extending two booms. The mission team will then spend a few days getting the five-layer structure to the proper tension, wrapping up such work no earlier than Sunday (Jan. 2).

That will end the sunshield deployment, and the Webb team will move on to the telescope's optics. Webb's primary and secondary mirrors are expected to be deployed by Jan. 7, according to NASA, bringing the observatory's deployment phase to an end.

Copper

Final mirror opening live now

Link to video

George K · "Now look here, you Baltic gas passer... " - Mik, 6/14/08

Pitchers today:

https://www.space.com/james-webb-space-telescopes-first-images-nasa-announcement?fbclid=IwAR3dAKpUqBn_Oj2DajLZvTkP84GLXvkT-NZ0Oho201rosp_W--j0ccQ0S4k&utm_campaign=socialflow

89th

89th

Terrific, we send a 13 billion dollar selfie stick into space.

mark

@89th said in James Webb Space Telescope Launch Update:

Terrific, we send a 13 billion dollar selfie stick into space.

George K · "Now look here, you Baltic gas passer... " - Mik, 6/14/08

"Let's align the mirrors."

https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/2022/02/11/photons-received-webb-sees-its-first-star-18-times/

The team’s challenge was twofold: confirm that NIRCam was ready to collect light from celestial objects, and then identify starlight from the same star in each of the 18 primary mirror segments. The result is an image mosaic of 18 randomly organized dots of starlight, the product of Webb’s unaligned mirror segments all reflecting light from the same star back at Webb’s secondary mirror and into NIRCam’s detectors.

What looks like a simple image of blurry starlight now becomes the foundation to align and focus the telescope in order for Webb to deliver unprecedented views of the universe this summer. Over the next month or so, the team will gradually adjust the mirror segments until the 18 images become a single star.

“The entire Webb team is ecstatic at how well the first steps of taking images and aligning the telescope are proceeding. We were so happy to see that light makes its way into NIRCam,” said Marcia Rieke, principal investigator for the NIRCam instrument and regents professor of astronomy, University of Arizona.