All her light in one place

NASA today Share photos Noting that he has successfully completed the image alignment phase in operating the James Webb Space Telescope. Webb’s primary mirror is made up of 18 individual segments, and as of today’s update, all of these segments are aligned so that the star appears as a single object. Although there are still many fine-tuning steps required, the telescope’s operating path remains shorter.

Immediately after launch, the focus was on detecting all parts of the telescope that had to be transported in a compact configuration to fit the launch vehicle. This process involved reorienting and widening the primary mirror, lowering the secondary mirror in place, and expanding a multi-layered sunscreen that helps keep the imaging device cool.

To the surprise and happiness of many people, this Things turned out unbelievably. Since then, the focus has shifted to…well, the focus. The basic Webb mirror consists of 18 separate mirrors in a hexagonal array, each of which can be individually controlled. Initially, when the mirror was first opened, these smears produced 18 individual smears scattered across the secondary mirror.

Earlier this month, modifications were made to the mirrors Create a hex array The swabs that repeated the arrangement of the primary mirror segments. Today’s announcement saw a panning change so that each swab was partially focused and moved to the center of the secondary mirror. consequences? The star imaged for this process is now a single point in the center of the telescope’s field of view.

NASA isn’t done yet, though. Even though all the images are in the same place, they are only superimposed there. The end goal is to make clips behave like a single mirror, which requires more precise focusing. To do this, the engineers will image the spectra of light, looking for subtle changes in the image’s positions at different wavelengths. From here you can learn how to move the mirrors to adjust the mirror parts.