Webb has reached its destination and entered its intended orbit
After a month's journey, this is it James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) straight into orbit around the Lagrange point L2 occurred. Over the next five months, Webb will be prepared for operations, with scientific research due to begin in June
The mirrors and scientific instruments of Webb have not yet reached the required stable operating temperature. You still need to cool down a bit. And they started to cool down, and very quickly, as soon as the telescope saw the heat shield unrolled. However, this process is not left to nature alone. It is tightly controlled by placing electrically heated strips at strategic points on the telescope. Thanks to this it was possible both the uniform shrinkage throughout telescopic structure both to control and to ensure that the moisture absorbed by the earth evaporates and does not freeze to the optics or sensors, which could hamper scientific research.
Well there Webb Once at its destination, the control center will use the fine-tuning sensor to point the telescope at one of the bright stars and verify that the observatory is able to select such a target, focus on it, and track it as it makes its way through orbit . Verification of proper operation is mainly performed with the NIRCam instrument. However, since the telescope's primary mirror is not yet properly aligned, up to 18 fuzzy images of the observed star are taken.
Once it is confirmed that Webb is able to track the selected target, the tedious process of adjusting all 18 segments of the primary mirror, so that it looks like a large mirror. The individual segments of the mirror will move with nanometer precision and the entire process will take three full months.
In the meantime, Webb's cooling process will be complete and all devices will be at their lowest passive temperatures possible. The heat shield ensures that the telescope has a stable operating temperature from below -223,15 degrees Celsius has. An active cooling system is then activated, maintaining the optimal operating temperature for one of Webb's four instruments, MIRI, should ensure. The Mid-Infrared Instrument is an extremely sensitive camera and spectrograph operating in the mid-infrared range. The instrument is so sensitive that from Earth it could see a burning candle on one of Jupiter's moons. However, to develop its full potential, it needs very low temperatures. Therefore, an innovative two-stage active cooling system was required to bring MIRI to an operating temperature of -266,16 degrees Celsius. From now on, Webb will be able to take high-quality images of distant stars or Galaxies to create.
In the fifth and sixth month after launch, all four scientific instruments will be calibrated and their various modes of operation will be tested on representative targets in space. The telescope's ability to track "moving" objects such as asteroids, comets, planets or moons in the solar system is also being tested. Soon after, the NASA announce the results of their tests and demonstrate the full capabilities of the telescope.