NASA’s Giant James Webb Space Telescope fired its rocket engines for five minutes and reached its final destination, where it will spend the remainder of its service examining the universe and capturing the light emitted shortly following the Big Bang.
The telescope has been in space for a month since its Christmas launch from the European Spaceport in French Guiana.
It put the final correction to the path, the third since the telescope was launched into a gravitationally stable position where it will always be approximately 1 million miles from Earth.
The telescope orbits in a spot where the gravitational forces of the Sun and Earth balance, so it needs only a little fuel, and it will constantly face the night side of the planet to keep its infrared devices at low temperatures.
The high-stakes, long-delayed mission, saddled with ambitious astronomical targets and a $10 billion budget, has gone well, overcoming a large list of potential hurdles that have haunted engineers for years.
newspaper quotes Washington Post John Dorning, deputy director of the Web project at the US Space Agency (NASA), said that “everything went according to the scenario.”
“It was shocking, we expected challenges, as happens in every mission. But nothing went wrong,” he added.
The telescope deployed its solar arrays, a solar shield, and a set of 18 gold-plated hexagonal mirrors.
And the typical launch of the telescope led to “doubling its operational life”, according to NASA, which said that the telescope did not exhaust as much fuel as expected, which saved a lot of fuel and extended the life of the telescope from 10 years as planned to 20 years, according to Dorning.
The telescope can capture the light emitted only a few hundred million years following the Big Bang, which is estimated to be 13.8 billion years old.
It is assumed that the telescope will be able to see the first galaxies and study the evolution of the universe, and it can also give a better look at the objects closest to Earth, including in our solar system.
The telescope was designed in the 1980s and has been in development since the mid-1990s.
The main challenge for the telescope was to synchronize all of its mirrors to a uniform focal length, giving its images the right resolution.
