The James Webb Space Telescope, launched by the US Aeronautics and Space Administration, “NASA”, is close to reaching its destination, where it will settle, on Monday, in an orbit around the Sun, regarding 1.6 million kilometers from Earth.
And through a maneuver to correct the final trajectory using the rocket propulsion devices on board the telescope at 1900 GMT, it is expected that “Webb”, which is designed for humanity to take a look at the early stages of the universe, to its stable location between the Earth and the sun known as the “Lagrand 2” point. Or “L2”, a month following its launch.
Eric Smith, scientific director of NASA’s Web program, said controller engineers at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore will operate the thrusters, and the ground team will use radio signals to confirm that Webb has successfully entered orbit.
From its privileged position in space, the Webb telescope will follow a special path to remain compatible with the Earth in the rotation of the planet and the telescope together around the sun, allowing wireless communication with it without interruption.
The Hubble Space Telescope, which was launched thirty years before Webb, orbits the Earth at an altitude of 547 kilometers, which makes it enter and exit the Earth’s shadow every 90 minutes.
The gravitational forces of the sun and the Earth together allow the “L2” point to maintain the telescope in its position, so that it does not need an additional rocket thrust to prevent it from moving away from its location.
The operations center also began adjusting the main mirror of the telescope, which is made up of 18 gold-plated beryllium octagonal mirrors, each 6.5 meters wide, much larger than the main mirror of the Hubble telescope.
The size of the telescope and its design will allow it to work mainly in infrared light to carefully look through the clouds of gas and dust and observe objects at greater distances, i.e. knowing what happened in earlier times than what was made available by Hubble or other telescopes to mankind.
These properties are expected to herald a revolution in the world of astronomy, allowing a first view of galaxies in the stages of their formation only 100 million years following the Big Bang, whose theory says that the known universe began to expand in continuous motion 13.8 billion years ago.
The devices installed on the Webb telescope make it ideal for searching for signs of planets that allow life on their surface among dozens of planets orbiting distant stars that have recently been documented, as well as observing celestial bodies closer to Earth, such as Mars and Titan, one of Jupiter’s moons.
Next steps
It will take several more months to prepare the Webb telescope for its launch in space.
The 18 mirrors that make up the primary mirror were deployed with the rest of the telescope’s structural components within two weeks of its launch on December 25, and the mirror parts were folded to allow it to be stored in the space of storage aboard the rocket that launched the telescope into space.
The eighteen mirrors must now be aligned to achieve proper focus for the main mirror, a process that would take three months to complete.
Meanwhile, ground teams will begin activating the spectrograph, camera and other devices, and Smith said this will be followed by a two-month calibration process for the devices themselves.
But Smith said that the telescope’s most ambitious missions, including plans to point the mirror at the furthest objects from Earth, would take longer, so the world would not be able to receive these images for some time.
The telescope is an international project led by “NASA” in cooperation with the European and Canadian Space Agency.