Webb's primary mirror is fully deployed, a gold-star engineering feat

 

Two weeks after a perfect Christmas launch of the Webb Space Telescope, NASA engineers finished the final stage of all the major deployments needed to prep for use of the precision instrument in coming months.

The result of crazy complex engineering over decades, teams on Saturday fully deployed Webb’s 21-foot, gold-coated primary mirror after earlier completing deployment of a five-layer sunscreen and a secondary mirror.

Engineers will now begin moving the 18 primary hexagonal mirrors into a unified focus. There are 126 actuators on the backside of each segment to flex each mirror into proper alignment, a process expected to last three or more months.  The first Webb images are expected to reach Earth this summer.

A third mid-course correction burn is expected in coming days to put the telescope in orbit around the Sun at about 1 million miles from Earth at a point known as L2 where the gravitational pull from Earth, Sun and Moon offers an ideal orbit.

Webb will be able to collect infrared light from objects as far as 13.5 billion light years away with higher resolution than before, offering a celestial smorgasbord of research opportunities for astronomers around the globe.

Webb is a joint effort of NASA and the European Space Agency and Canadian Space Agency.

Gregory Robinson, Webb program director at NASA, said the deployments were the first time a NASA-led mission has completed a complex sequence to unfold an observatory in space.

Into the 15th day of the mission, Webb had traveled 700,000 miles from Earth where temperatures were recorded as low as minus 328 degrees F, according to a NASA mission timeline.

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