All 17 of the observatory's scientific instrument 'modes' have now been fully vetted, NASA announced today (July 11).
atop an Arianespace Ariane V rocket on Dec. 25, 2021, kicking off a month-long trek to the Sun-Earth Lagrange Point 2 , a gravitationally stable spot in space about 930,000 miles from our planet.
Mission team members conducted a series of complex deployments during that journey, notching milestones such as unfolding Webb's five-layer sunshield, which is about the size of a tennis court. And the prep work continued long after the observatory got to L2, as the Webb team labored to get all four of the telescope's super-sensitive science instruments up to speed.
Each of those instruments can operate in multiple modes, as NASA explained in today's update. And the final mode has now been fully vetted. "The last of all 17 instrument modes to be commissioned was NIRCam's coronagraph capability, which works to mostly block incoming starlight by inserting a mask in front of a target star, suppressing the target star's relatively bright light to increase contrast and enable detection of fainter nearby companions such asRelated stories:
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