NASA is working to enable the James Webb telescope to accurately see the universe, as the observation process will begin early next summer.
The main mirror circle consists of 18 hexagonal pieces of gold-plated beryllium, with a diameter of 6.5 meters, a surface that has a much greater ability to collect light compared to the “Hubble” telescope that preceded the new telescope by thirty years.
The 18 pieces, which were placed together in the cargo bay of the rocket that carried the telescope into space, opened with the rest of its components within two weeks after the telescope was launched on December 25.
These pieces must now be separated from the valves installed at the time of launch, and moved to the front half an inch away from their original position in a process that lasts ten days before being re-arranged to form a single continuous surface that collects the light.
According to Lee Feinberg, director of the optical component of the telescope, “James Webb”, the process of returning the class will take another three months.
Feinberg added that aligning the main mirror pieces together to form one large mirror means stacking each piece at a distance “up to one-five thousandths of the thickness of a human hair.”
He continued, “All of this required us to invent things that had never happened before, such as micro-motors that were designed to move gradually at a temperature of 240 degrees Celsius below zero in the vacuum of space,” according to “Reuters”.
According to Feinberg, if all goes as planned, the telescope will be ready to take the first scientific images in May, and they will be processed for about another month before they can be published.
Huge potential
The James Webb telescope will see the universe in an infrared field, allowing it to observe through gas and dust clouds where stars are born, and its work mainly in ultraviolet optical waves.
The cost of the telescope amounted to nine billion dollars, and “NASA” described it as the first scientific observatories for space in the next decade, and it is about a hundred times more powerful than “Hubble”, allowing it to observe things at greater distances, and then reveal the secrets of time far beyond what any other telescope has reached.
And space scientists say it will give a glimpse into space that was never known before, dating back a hundred million years after the Big Bang theory.
The telescope is the result of an international collaboration led by “NASA” in partnership with the European and Canadian Space Agency.
The telescope weighs more than 6 thousand kilograms, and when opened, it is approximately the size of a tennis court.
Next month, the telescope will head to its destination in an orbit around the sun, about 1.6 million kilometers from Earth.
The telescope’s special path will maintain a stable alignment with Earth, as the planet and the telescope orbit the sun side by side.
The telescope was named “James Webb” after the head of NASA during most of the agency’s formation in the 1960s.
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