With the James Webb Space Telescope arrived at its destination, the telescope has to go through a series of alignment processes to get it ready for science.
With the James Webb Space Telescope at its final destination in orbit around the sun, now the telescope has to go through a series of alignment processes to get it ready for collecting science data. The process of aligning all of its mirrors has already begun, and concurrently with this, its instruments have been turned on for the first time since it left Earth as well.
The big step this week is that Webb’s primary camera, the Near Infrared Camera instrument, has detected its first photons of starlight. This is far from being a full image of space, like those taken by Hubble, however, and the impressive images aren’t expected to start arriving until this summer. For now, the data collected by NIRCam will be used in the process of aligning the mirrors.
“With deployment of the mirror segments now complete, and the instruments turned on, the team has begun the numerous steps required to prepare and calibrate the telescope to do its job,” Scott Acton and Chanda Walker of Ball Aerospace, plus Lee Feinberg of NASA Goddard, wrote in an update.
The entire process of alignment is expected to take around three months, after which the instruments will be commissioned.
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