The Webb Telescope has recently been launched into an orbit one million kilometres from Earth

 

On December 25, the telescope took off from Kourou, French Guiana.

 

The most powerful telescope ever sent into space has activated its rockets to take up its new intergalactic residence. The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has finished its final course correction and is now around 1 million miles (1.5 million kilometres) from Earth as it orbits the sun.

 

At approximately 2:00 p.m. EST, ground operators led the telescope through a last mid-course correction burn, fine-tuning JWST's final orbital position for its science mission, as announced by NASA representatives in a briefing.

 

At the briefing, Keith Parrish, JWST Observatory Manager at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) in Greenbelt, Maryland, said that the team fired JWST's station-keeping thruster for about five minutes to nudge the observatory into place without overshooting its destination gently; in contrast, the "big burn" course correction that was performed with a different thruster on December 25 was for a much more dramatic manoeuvre and lasted over 60 minutes.

 

The Webb Telescope, which cost $10 billion and was launched on December 25, 2021, took off from South America on Earth's sun-facing side and travelled in a curving path to its goal, the second Lagrange Point (L2). According to NASA, there are five Lagrange Points between the Earth and the sun were objects "park" due to the balance between gravity and centrifugal force imposed by their orbits.

 

At the meeting, Jane Rigby, the JWST Operations Project Scientist, compared the telescope to a Pringles potato chip. Rigby likened Webb's situation to that of a potato chip, saying that he would move in this manner "for the life of the mission," meaning that he would always move in a small, steady increment up one side of the chip before falling back down and moving up the other curved side.

 

From this vantage point, Webb will be in a halo orbit around L2 as it circuits the sun once every six months from this vantage point. According to a NASA statement, the telescope's thermal stability of its instruments and its access to solar power could be negatively impacted if the sun were eclipsed by Earth (from the telescope's perspective). This could be avoided if the telescope were placed in an orbit that would maintain its position relative to Earth and the sun.

 

According to the NASA briefing, Webb's operators will continue to fire the rocket booster roughly once every 21 days to adjust the telescope's orbit near L2. However, Webb's fuel stores should significantly outlast the predicted 10-year mission lifetime, even with the periodic, modest changes. As a matter of fact, according to Parrish, Webb might have enough fuel to operate for another 20 years.

 

Now that the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is in orbit at L2, the telescope will undergo additional testing and alignments over the next few months to perform science observations that will target some of the weakest and most distant objects in the cosmos.

 

Webb has already accomplished several important goals this month with great accomplishments. Live Science's sister site Space.com reported that on January 1, the telescope unfurled its massive sun shield, a crucial component for keeping its equipment cold as it searches for faint signals from the early universe. On January 8, NASA reported that Webb's huge gold mirror components had unfolded from their launch positions. At the briefing, JWST's Optical Telescope Element Manager at GSFC, Lee Feinberg, explained that over the next three months, engineers will align the telescope's primary mirror by pointing its 18 mirror segments at a bright isolated star, aligning and stacking those images, and then aligning the mirror segments to about 1/5000 of a human hair, so that they act as "a single monolithic mirror."

 

Parrish: "We're just so thrilled to have made it through the last 30 days, which we dubbed "30 days on edge." On the other hand, we had just finished laying the table. The best is yet to come; we were getting this gorgeous spaceship unfolded and ready to do science. "

 

In addition to Webb, the Hubble Space Telescope, which is currently in its third decade of orbiting the Earth at a distance of around 340 miles and taking spectacular space photographs, will continue to serve as Earth's eyes in the cosmos (547 km). Recent Hubble studies of the dwarf galaxy Henize 2-10, located about 34 million light-years from Earth, have provided hints that black holes may play a role in star formation, expanding on previous reports by Space.com.

 

But the ESA claims that Webb's infrared instruments and it's far more giant primary mirror — at 21.3 feet (6.5 metres) wide, it's the biggest ever dispatched to space — will provide unprecedented vistas of cosmic objects throughout its mission. NASA says that Webb will use infrared light to peer through clouds of dust that obscure the birth of stars and planets in the early cosmos.

 

As Rigby put it, "everything we're doing is about getting the observatory ready to undertake revolutionary science," from probing the atmospheres of planets circling other stars to looking for evidence of first-generation galaxies produced more than 13.5 billion years ago in the sky's darkest regions. It's been a month, and the baby still hasn't opened its eyes, but when it does, that'll be the moment of scientific truth we've all been waiting for.

Reference: https://www.livescience.com/james-webb-telescope-reaches-destination

Image source : https://pixabay.com/id/photos/mesin-melihat-penampil-menara-2127704/

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