The telescope has aligned the observatory’s mirror segment.
REPUBLIKA.CO.ID, WASHINGTON — The James Webb Space Telescope photographed star The first. The telescope has completed the first major stage in the long process of aligning the main mirror, namely the observatory’s 18 segmentation.
A single star observed by the observatory was deliberately changed 18 times into a hexagonal shape. In the end, the 18 images captured by each of the observatory mirror segments will be aligned into one sharp focus.
“The resulting images show the team has moved each of Webb’s 18 main mirror segments to bring 18 copies of a single unfocused star into the planned hexagonal formation,” a NASA official wrote in a post. blog Friday (18/2/2022), reported from SpaceSunday (20/2/2022).
“The images of stars are directed to this particular pattern so that they have the same relative location as the physical mirror,” said Matthew Lallo, systems scientist and manager of the telescope branch at the Space Telescope Science Institute, which manages Webb, in the release.
Next, the observatory will begin what engineers call “segment alignment”. The segment alignment corrects larger positioning errors in the individual segments of the primary mirror and updates the alignment of the secondary mirrors.
Once the segment alignment is completed successfully, the team will begin the third phase – “image stacking” – which will eventually bring the 18 images on top of each other into one clear display.
Lallo said the three-phase procedure would allow the team to experience an intuitive and natural way to visualize changes throughout the process.
“Another benefit is that we can now actually watch the main mirror slowly form into the exact and desired shape,” Lallo added.
Aligning the mirrors properly is a key goal of Webb’s commissioning, which is expected to be completed by the summer. The mission launches December 25, 2021, with the ambitious goal of seeing the early universe, exoplanets, and other points of interest in the cosmos.
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