The James Webb Space Telescope achieved another major milestone today, successfully extending its secondary mirror as it continues to sail seamlessly through its never-before-conducted deployment sequence on the way to its destination.
. Its task is to concentrate the light collected by the gold-coated main mirror into an opening at the main mirror's center. Through this opening, the light reaches the third mirror, which reflects it to the telescope's instruments.
On Wednesday , operators at Webb's operations center at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore released latches that secured the legs in place during launch. After having first performed a very small move to ensure the motors worked well, they then commenced the deployment procedure, which saw the legs extend and fall into place over the course of 10 minutes. NASA streamed the maneuver live with commentary on its TV channel.
"This is unbelievable. We are now at a point where we're about 600,000 miles [1 million kilometers] from Earth, and we actually have a telescope," Bill Ochs, theproject manager at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said in the webstream."So congratulations to everybody." The secondary mirror deployment comes only a day after the operators completed the most challenging part of Webb's self-building sequence —On Thursday , the operators will unpack a radiator on the back of the telescope, designed to remove heat from the scientific instruments. They will then move on to assembling the main 21-foot mirror, which due to its size also had to be folded for launch.
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