NASA on Wednesday began the painstaking months-long process of bringing its newly launched James Webb Space Telescope into focus, a mission that should be completed in time for the revolutionary eye in the sky to begin peering into the universe in early summer.
Mission control engineers at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, first send their initial commands to tiny motors called actuators, which slowly position and fine-tune the telescope’s primary mirror.
The primary mirror consists of 18 hexagonal segments of gold-coated beryllium metal and measures 21 feet 4 inches (6.5 m) in diameter—much larger than the 30-year-old light-collecting surface of Webb’s predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope.
Within two weeks of Webb’s Dec. 25 launch, the 18 sections were folded together to fit into the cargo bay of the rocket that will send the telescope into space, and unfolded along with other structural components.
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