Webb Telescope has completed its million-mile voyage. Now comes the tricky part.
On January 8, 2022, nearly 500,000 kilometers behind our planet, possibly humankind’s most significant technical feat came to completion.
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) was deployed entirely after 20 years of research and $10 billion in funding.
Engineers remotely managed 50 moving pieces and 178 release pins after the Ariane 5 rocket safely launched from the Guiana Space Centre in French Guiana on Christmas Day while tucked up in the fairing.
To place Webb in its final format, everything had to happen in precise order.
Webb reaches its greatest destination on Monday, January 24, following a 30-day voyage into space.
What is Webb?
Webb is the largest and most complex space observatory ever made. Webb is around 100 times more potent than Hubble and the size of a 70-foot tennis court. Its gigantic 21.6-foot primary mirror (compared to Hubble’s 8-foot primary mirror) is constructed of super-strong beryllium and is made up of 18 hexagonal elements.
Each section is gold-plated, which is perfect for imaging infrared light. That is the first difference between Webb and Hubble. In contrast to Hubble, who regards the cosmos in visible and ultraviolet light, Webb does it in old, stretched infrared radiation.
Because of this, as well as its larger mirror, it can peer farther back in time than astronomers ever could accomplish before.
Will Webb be able to Travel in Time?
Every telescope is a time device. Every single star’s light is age-old and has traveled a lengthy distance to meet you. Actually, the light from the Sun is 8 minutes and 20 seconds old. Sirius, the most glowing star in the night sky, is 8.6 light-years faraway.
That implies its light has traveled at 186,000 miles per second for 8.6 years to meet your sight.
Every photon Webb detects is old light, but it detects the most ancient light since it’s an infrared telescope.
Infrared light has longer wavelengths than perceptible light, making it invisible to the human eye.
Webb will be able to spot the very most earliest stars and galaxies that originated hundred million years after the Big Bang, which no other telescope has been able to complete.
That is why Webb was built.
What’s the Present Status of Webb?
The Webb telescope has reached destination.
Webb will be there at night, even if it’s too little and faint to be seen with the human eye. It is now placed in the Monoceros constelattion, just east of Orion’s Belt.
Webb will always stay on the night side of our planet, giving it a great perspective of foreign space.
Webb has traveled a million miles/1.5 million kilometers from Earth to the second Lagrange point (L2).
This is a critical place in space linked with Earth.
L2, called after an Italian mathematician, is a gravitational balancing pinpoint on the far side of Earth away from the Sun – around four times the length between the Earth and the Moon – where the gravity of the Earth and the Sun merge to form a relatively stable position.
It’s a site where Webb can always keep the Sun, Earth, and Moon behind it, directing its solar panels backward while its enormous mirror is shaded from sunlight by five tennis court-sized sun shield panels.
L2 is also helpful since it is close enough to Earth for us to keep easy communication
Webb is not like other space telescopes, including Hubble, that look into space while orbiting Earth.
So, unlike Hubble, which was famously fixed by Space Shuttle astronauts in 1993 after launching with an optical issue a few years earlier, Webb is too far away to be repaired if anything goes wrong.
What is Webb Going to do Now?
According to NASA, it may take until April 24 to put in place all the 18 hexagonal gold-covered beryllium pieces that will form Webb’s main mirror.
The telescope is not ready out of the box. The initial photos will be fuzzy, as stated by Jane Rigby, Webb Operations Project Scientist, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.
Engineers will basically have 18 photos that must be patched together into a single telescopic image.
It’s going to be difficult job. Rigby said:
“We start with the mirrors off by millimeters and we’re driving them to be aligned to within less than a size of a Coronavirus – to 10s of nanometers. It’s a very deliberate process that is time consuming.”
Engineers will need around two months to aim Webb to glowing stars to correctly collimate and focus the telescope after that procedure is finished, which should be around mid-March.
Next, they will test Webb’s four main scientific tools as they cool to -370 degrees Fahrenheit/-223 degrees Celsius.
According to NASA, the first photographs from Webb will not be available soon, which is expected in late May.
“We want to make sure that the first images that the world sees do justice to this $10 billion telescope, Rigby added.
She doesn’t know what the pictures will be about. However, she expects deep infrared overlays on famous Hubble views like the Horsehead Nebula and the Pillars of Creation.
Now that Webb has arrived safely at its destination, we can look forward to a new age in astronomy. However, what’s next?
