NASA on Wednesday embarked on a months-long, painstaking process of bringing its newly launched James Webb Space Telescope into focus, a task due for completion in time for the revolutionary eye in the sky to begin peering into the cosmos by early summer.
The James Webb Space Telescope is packed up for shipment to its launch site in Kourou, French Guiana in an undated photograph at Northrop Grumman's Space Park in Redondo Beach, California. NASA/Chris Gunn/Handout via REUTERSnewly launched James Webb Space Telescope
Consisting of 18 hexagonal segments of gold-plated beryllium metal, the primary mirror measures 21 feet 4 inches in diameter - a much larger light-collecting surface than Webb's predecessor, the 30-year-old Hubble Space Telescope.The 18 segments, which had been folded together to fit inside the cargo bay of the rocket that carried the telescope to space, were unfurled with the rest of its structural components during a two-week period following Webb's launch on Dec. 25.
Aligning the primary mirror segments to form one large mirror means each segment "is aligned to one-five-thousandth the thickness of a human hair", Feinberg said. If all goes as planned, the telescope should be ready to capture its first science images in May, which would be processed over about another month before they can be released to the public, Feinberg said.
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