The space telescope “James Webb” opened the last and most important mirror this Saturday and was fully functional this weekend after reaching the final configuration, prepared over 20 years.
Two weeks after departing from planet Earth, Humanity’s latest “space envoy” beyond Earth’s last frontier unfolded, opened and installed the 6.5-meter-diameter, gold-plated mirror, which it carried folded up to save space. and gain speed.
The telescope is now ready for full operation, which, however, should only start in June, when it reaches the defined orbital position, 1.5 billion kilometers from Earth.
The “James Webb” will still have to go through a planned third combustion to align the route to place itself in the orbit defined around the second Lagrange point, nicknamed “L2” in the astronomical environment.
Bill Nelson, one of the administrators of the United States space agency (NASA), predicts “about six months” until “the images” collected by “James Webb” begin to be received on Earth.
It will be five months of cooling down after this first leg of the trip, alignment with the route and calibration before the telescope starts sending data back to astronomers from NASA and the Canadian Space Agency, which is also participating in this project.
“When this starts, the horizon is no longer our limit and we will collect all kinds of new knowledge about who we are, what we are, where we came from and if there is more life in space”, said the NASA official.
The “James Webb” telescope has predicted to record data with unprecedented precision of more than 13 billion years of activity in space, which is to say, beyond the last frontier of planet Earth.
This new NASA “space envoy” is also tasked with discovering new galaxies, studying the atmospheres of planets far, far away and assessing whether they are habitable for humans.
“The ‘James Webb’ Space Telescope is an unprecedented mission about to see the light of the first galaxies and uncover the mysteries of our universe. Every feat already achieved and every future achievement is a testament to the thousands of innovators who have put their passion lives on this mission”, said Bill Nelson.
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