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Vital step for the continuation of its mission, the James Webb telescope saw, Tuesday, its heat shield, which must protect it from the heat of the Sun, to be completely opened.
The James Webb telescope broke away from the Ariane rocket on Christmas Day.
AFP
The James Webb Space Telescope on Tuesday took a major milestone for the success of its mission, with the full deployment of its heat shield, an essential element for conducting future observations of the cosmos, announced the NSO.
This sun visor is made up of five layers, each the size of a tennis court, intended to protect scientific instruments from the heat of our star. They have been carefully unfolded and stretched one by one since Monday.
900,000 kilometers away
Too large to fit into a rocket, the telescope had to be folded over on itself like an origami and requires deployment into space, a procedure trest perilous. The deployment of this sun visor was one of the most difficult stages.
The most powerful space telescope ever designed, James Webb is awaited by astronomers around the world and must make it possible to observe in particular the first galaxies, formed only a few hundred million years following the big bang.
The observatory took off a little over a week ago from French Guiana and is currently more than 900,000 kilometers from Earth. It is still on its way to reach its final orbit, 1.5 million kilometers from us, or four times the Earth-Moon distance. In this place, in the event of a problem, no repair mission can be envisaged.
Piloted from the east coast
Its deployment, piloted from Baltimore, on the American east coast, must therefore be carried out without any missteps. More than a hundred engineers are currently working there twenty four hyours on twenty four to make sure everything goes as planned.
The NSO broadcast the event live on the internet on Monday morning. As no camera is on board James Webb, the only images available were those of the operations control room, where the teams chargIt’ses of the deployment applauded with joy following announcing the power-on of the fifth layer.
(AFP)