Cape Canaveral, Fla. (AFP) – NASA’s new space telescope captured its first starlight and even took a selfie of its giant golden mirror.
After a month-and-a-half mission, all 18 parts of the James Webb Space Telescope’s main mirror are functioning properly, officials said Friday.
The telescope’s first target was a bright star 258 light-years away in the constellation Ursa Major.
“It was a really cool moment,” said Marshall Perrin of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore.
Over the next few months, the hexagonal parts of the mirror – each the size of a coffee table – will be aligned and focused as one piece, allowing scientific observations to begin by the end of June.
The $10 billion infrared observatory – the successor to the old Hubble Space Telescope – will seek light from the first stars and galaxies that formed in the universe nearly 14 billion years ago. It will also examine the atmospheres of extraterrestrial worlds for any possible signs of life.
NASA didn’t discover the crippling flaw in the Hubble mirror until following it was launched in 1990. It took more than three years before spacewalking astronauts might correct the telescope’s blurry vision.
Feinberg said that while everything looks good so far with Webb, engineers should be able to rule out any major mirror faults by next month.
The 21-foot (6.5 m) gold-plated Webb Mirror is the largest ever launched into space. An infrared camera on the telescope captured an image of the mirror as one of the clips stared at the target star.
The reaction was pretty much “the holy cow,” Feinberg said. “.
NASA has released a selfie with a mosaic of starlight from each part of the mirror. 18 points of starlight look like glowing fireflies floating in the dark night sky.
After 20 years of the project, “it’s been incredibly satisfying” to see everything work so well so far, said Marcia Rickey of the University of Arizona, chief scientist of the infrared camera.
Webb took off from South America in December and reached its exact location 1.6 million miles away last month.
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