NASA’s James Webb telescope completes optical alignment

byMohammedIbrahimMohammed

The 18 hexagonal mirror segments of the mighty James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have been opened and aligned like a beautiful space butterfly. NASA engineers from Ball Aerospace, Space Telescope Science Institute, and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center have worked for almost five months aligning the segments, and after a long wait, the alignment process was successfully completed in late April, as predicted by NASA.

Scientists working on the telescope have said that the image quality and performance exceeded their expectations. The team is excited to start working on adjusting the other sensitive equipment of the telescope and start taking pictures of a place that took a 13.4 billion lightyear journey to reach us.

What is this new telescope?

The James Webb Telescope was launched in Dec. 25, 2021 and was one of the biggest projects NASA had been working for close to 2 decades. It is used to detect faint infrared waves from as far as the beginning of the universe. To keep this extremely sensitive equipment correctly functioning, the telescope must be covered from heat made by the Sun, the Earth, and the Moon, which is maintained by its very special halo orbit around the L2 Lagrange gravitational stability point. This allows the telescope to stay stable in position, and the pull from the Earth and the Sun cancel out. The telescope uses a sunshield to protect itself from the heat, and to keep its scientific equipment fully functioning. NASA hopes that this telescope can get us closer to solving the 14.2 billion year story known as our universe.

How was this new telescope made?

The telescope has several components that make it up, some of these are:

• Optics

• Sunshield

• Scientific instruments

These components are essential for the telescope’s ability to detect infrared waves from outer space. Read further to know how these components work and what they are used for!

Optics: The telescope’s main way to “see” is its optic mirrors. The telescope’s primary mirror is composed of 18 hexagonal segments, which are unfolding right now! These mirror segments have 132 small motors which are used to align it to outer space, and occasionally correct its direction, which can change from small space micro particles.

Sunshield:

To make the telescope’s ultrasensitive infrared equipment functional, it uses a 5- layered sunshield the size of a tennis court to protect itself from the harsh heat of the Sun. It is covered with ultrareflective film that reflects the heat back into space.

Scientific instruments: All of the scientific instruments on the James Webb Telescope are found in the Integrated Scientific Instrument Module (ISIM), which also provides computing resources, cooling capacity, and structural stability to all of the telescope. It contains 4 scientific instruments and a guide camera:

• NIRCam (Near InfraRed Camera), which is an infrared imager that is used to align the main 18 mirror segments.

• NIRSpec (Near InfraRed Spectograph), which will perform spectroscopy in the visible to near infrared wavelength spectrum.

• MIRI (Mid InfraRed Instrument), which will measure the mid-to-long infrared wavelength range.

• FGS/NIRISS (Fine Guidance System and Near InfraRed Imager and Slitless Spectograph), which will be used to stabilize the line of sight for scientific observations.

In conclusion, this telescope is a work of scientific art, and it may bring us one step closer to knowing the workings of our universe.