Just over a week after reaching the second Lagrangian point (L2), the James Webb Telescope will begin observing the birth of our universe, beginning a three-month process of calibrating the mirrors. The telescope received the first batch of starlight photons that passed through the entire observatory and were detected by the Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam) instrument.
This marks the beginning of the process of aligning 18 mirrors to direct light onto a mirror to observe infrared light from distant worlds, galaxies and the origin of our universe. Data from NIRCam will be used by engineers at Ball Aerospace, the Space Telescope Science Institute and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center to calibrate the telescope.
“This milestone marks the first of many steps in capturing initially unfocused images and using them to slowly fine-tune the telescope. This is the beginning of the process, but so far the initial results are in line with expectations and simulations,” NASA The bureau said in a statement.
Align the mirror
The process of calibrating a telescope has been practiced many times on the ground before it is used in the vacuum of space. The team developed a 1/6 scale model telescope for testing. Over the next three months, the telescope will be calibrated in seven stages, followed by the commissioning of the onboard instruments.
However, NASA made it clear that Webb’s images during this period won’t be as “pretty” as Webb’s new view of the universe, which will be released later this summer. They serve strictly the purpose of preparing telescopes for science. To work together, the telescope’s 18 primary mirror segments need to be matched to each other to a fraction of the wavelength of light around 50 nanometers, NASA said.
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