FLORIDA – James Webb Space Telescope or James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is entering its final preparatory stage before operating to record the activity of the universe. Scientist NASA is preparing to make final adjustments to the instruments aboard his state-of-the-art observatory.
NASA says the James Webb telescope has calibrated and characterized the instrument using a variety of astronomical sources. The process is to make sure everything is working before Webb is up and running early this summer.
“We will measure the throughput of the instrument, how much light entering the telescope reaches the detector and is recorded,” said Scott Friedman, Principal Commissioning Scientist for James Webb at the Baltimore Space Science Telescope Institute. 5/2022).
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The engineers still want to know the throughput at several wavelengths of light to assess Webb’s performance at gathering infrared light. Although no telescope can accurately collect every photon that passes through it.
Friedman stressed commissioning is nearing completion, as the telescope is in its final two-month process, which begins following the Webb launch on December 25, 2021. “Once the instrument is properly assessed, we will be ready to begin the great science program that astronomers and the public have been waiting for. ,” he said.
The team has released several commissioning images along the way, and an important commissioning target will soon be in focus: the Large Magellanic Cloud. Each instrument performs well, including the optics tested, while additional filters and a tool called a “diffraction grating” (which scatters light into the constituent colors) will also be assessed.
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The team will also certify the observatory’s target acquisition to ensure the telescope can point with precision down to one hundredth of an arc second, which will be useful for exoplanet observations. The last test activity is observing moving targets such as planets, satellites, rings, asteroids, and comets.
“We will test this capability by observing asteroids at different apparent speeds using each instrument,” Friedman said.
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