Eighteen mirror segments on NASA's newest space telescope worked in unison to take this deep field image.
Aligning Webb’s many mirror segments was no small task, especially in the extreme conditions of space. This was achieved by finely controlling multiple motors behind each segment. It was a crucial phase and a big milestone, allowing NASA to produce images with unprecedented clarity, as it did this week.
“We have exceeded every expectation,” Scott Acton, Webb’s lead wavefront sensing and control scientist, said in a on the telescope’s official YouTube channel. “The telescope has performed better than the models said it should.”The $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope mission is the most complex and expensive observatory of its kind ever launched into space. It has been decades in the making, and so these advancements have been highly anticipated.
“More than 20 years ago, the Webb team set out to build the most powerful telescope that anyone has ever put in space and came up with an audacious optical design to meet demanding science goals,” Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’s associate administrator of science, said in aThe Webb telescope’s “selfie,” showing all 18 mirror segments as they collect light from the same star.
“Of all the sleepless nights I’ve had and the worries that I’ve had, they are all behind us now,” said Zurbuchen, according to. “There’s still a mountain to climb, those important tasks that need to be done. But we are way up that mountain.”Hannah Seo is a science contributor at Popular Science. She started as an intern in 2020 and has since regularly contributed to both Popular Science’s website and quarterly magazine.
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