All four science instruments on NASA's James Webb Space Telescope have achieved 'perfect alignment' in advance of the telescope's official debut this summer, project officials said in a news teleconference on Monday (May 9).
With its instruments aligned, the Webb telescope awaits a final instrument calibration before it officially begins studying distant stars later this summer, NASA said.
In July, the telescope will share its first suite of science images, targeting galaxies and objects that"highlight all the Webb sciences themes ... from the early , to galaxies over time, to the life cycle of stars, and to other worlds," Klaus Pontoppidan, Webb project scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, said in the news briefing.NASA launched the US$10 billion Webb telescope on 25 December 2021, sending the telescope on a 930,000-mile journey to its final position in the sky. The telescope is composed of 18 hexagonal mirror segments, fitted together into one large, 21-foot-wide mirror.
The design allowed the telescope's mirror system to be folded inside a rocket at launch – unlike Webb's predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope, which has justfor the Hubble Space Telescope to see. The telescope was designed to observe the dim light of the earliest stars in the Universe, dating to about 13.8 billion years ago – just millions of years after the
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