The James Webb Space Telescope has been fully published. So what’s next for the largest extraterrestrial observatory?

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Work began for the James Webb Space Telescope.

On Saturday (January 8), the new observatory, the largest space telescope ever built, successfully revealed the last primary mirror segment to limit what NASA described as one of the most complex space-based deployments ever. The Webb mission team is now turning its attention to directing the telescope to its final destination, while getting key parts of the observatory online for its astronomy work.

Webb is expected to reach the “input site” by January 23, setting it up to fire its engines to glide to a “parking spot” called Earth-sun Lagrange Point 2 (L2) about 930,000 miles (1.5 million kilometers) away from our planet. If Webb gets to the right zone, he can use minimal fuel to stay in place thanks to the near-perfect alignment with the Sun, Earth, and Moon.

But it’s not just maneuvers in space that the control teams will need to perform. Webb still has a lot of complex commissioning ahead, and NASA has specifically noted its mirror alignment and instrument setup as major landmarks to watch in the next few weeks.

LIVE UPDATES: NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope mission

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope engineering team celebrates at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, as the observatory finished opening its primary mirror on Jan. 8, 2022. (Image source: NASA/Bill Ingalls)

As Webb prepares for the engine’s firing, team members will spend the next 15 days aligning the 18 mirror sectors to “work essentially as one mirror,” John Dorning, deputy project manager for Webb at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, told reporters Saturday ( January 28). 8) at a news conference from the Webb Control Center at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland.

“I should also say, Webb will start running the machines in the next week or so,” Dorning added. “And then, after we get to level 2, where the devices are cool enough, they [engineers] You will start playing all the different tools. “

L2 is an ideal location for Webb to do its job. Thanks to its large distance from the sun and sunscreen, Webb will operate in the darkness required for infrared heat monitoring. Infrared wavelengths will allow the telescope to peer through the dust to look at things like small exoplanets, or inside distant galaxies, all in its quest to understand the universe and its evolution.

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Webb is equipped with four scientific instruments that enable observations in visible, near-infrared and mid-infrared (0.6 to 28.5 µm) wavelengths, including a near-infrared camera, a near-infrared spectrometer, a mid-infrared instrument and an array Precision Orientation Sensor and Spectrometer, according to NASA.

“Every machine has its own set of features,” Dorning said. “This will be a challenge for [calibrate] Once they reach the temperature, making sure everything is aligned.

Deployment of the mirror will begin Tuesday (January 11), Lee Feinberg, Webb’s Optical Telescope Element Director at Goddard, explained at the press conference. The mirrors were folded due to the pressures of the launch and it would take between 10 and 12 days to “orient all the mirrors by about half an inch, and that puts them in a position where we can do the detailed optical alignment,” Feinberg said.

The basic alignment will take about three months to prepare for “first light,” when the telescope takes its first test image as part of the alignment process. NASA has warned that these first images will likely be blurry, because the telescope is not yet fully aligned. It will take more imaging and testing to get the configuration right.

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The animation shows the orbit of the James Webb Space Telescope around the Lagrange point 2 or L2. (Image credit: NASA)

“At about day 120 is the time when we think the entire telescope will align,” Dorning said, which will set a full alignment date around April 24, depending on how the commissioning process goes.

He added that the hardware commissioning will take place in parallel with the various tools team partners, who will “run different tools and … then” [will] Use these tools to align the telescope and to further improve the telescope. “

There is little historical sensitivity regarding blurry images from space telescopes, with the Hubble Space Telescope notoriously launching in 1990 with a type of myopia that had to be corrected due to an engineering error. Hubble operates in low Earth orbit, which makes it accessible to astronauts aboard the space shuttle for repairs and upgrades. Webb would be too far removed from such work and could only be calibrated through remote operations.

“We start with mirrors from millimeters and drive them to be in the range below the size of the coronavirus, down to tens of nanometers,” Jane Rigby, a Web Operations Project Scientist at Goddard, told reporters.

“It’s a very deliberate process that takes a lot of time. Just so everyone knows, the first pictures we take…This telescope isn’t ready out of the box. The first pictures are going to be ugly. It’s going to be blurry. We’ll [have] 18 of these little pictures are all over the sky, and we have to drive them to one telescope.

“I like to think of it as if we had 18 mirrors out there now, little prima dunas, all doing their own thing, singing their own tune and whatever key they were in,” Rigby continued. “We have to make them work like a chorus, and this is a systematic and arduous process.”

With the commissioning over, Rigby said the team is planning a set of “dazzling images” designed to demonstrate the telescope’s capabilities. These first goals have not been released to the media, but Rigby said the goal of these first images will be to “display all four science instruments and really take everyone’s socks off”.

During the press conference, officials said the first images will include things like stars (to check for exact alignment) and the Large Magellanic Cloud (to assess the telescope’s ability to offer shades of luminosity or inherent brightness).

After commissioning (which will take about six months) it will be a five-month initial science operations period consisting of “early release science programmes,” with a set of six categories of work ranging from planetary formation to stellar physics.

Follow Elizabeth Howell on Twitter @howellspace. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

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