James Webb Space Telescope: main mirror to be installed this weekend

Tomorrow, Saturday, the James Webb Space Telescope will begin to open the complex main mirror and thus complete the complex structure in space. This was announced by NASA, which wants to accompany the procedure directly in the stream. Since there is no camera image from the telescope, experts on the ground will have their say and explain the steps.

It should start at 3pm CET at the earliest There is a live broadcast on NASA TV, among other things. One of the forward inclined “wings” should be cut off, and then the second. Once both are in place, the “unprecedented process of space exploration” will be completed, as NASA writes, the space telescope can prepare scientific work.

There are no security cameras on board

After the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) finally placed the sun shield, secondary mirror and cooling system, NASA also answered frequently asked questionsWhy are there no control cameras on the device? In fact, it was checked whether cameras should not be added to monitor complex assembly procedures. However, there were various arguments against this, as there had to be a very large number of cameras to be able to provide really useful photos. In addition, the side facing the sun is too bright and the side facing the sun is too cold to install cameras without special precautions. Overall, the various sensors provided enough data to keep the telescope’s condition under control at all times.

Hubble’s much-anticipated successor, JWST, was launched on December 25 and has since been on a nearly month-long journey to the L2 Lagrange point, which is four times as far from Earth as the Moon. There, with Earth between it and the Sun, the telescope is shielded from the Sun, Earth, and Moon by a sun shield the size of a tennis court and looks into the depths of space.

Since it is an infrared telescope, it must be operated very nicely so as not to bother with its own infrared radiation. Only in the summer of 2022 will it be cooled down to the required 40 K (minus 233 degrees Celsius) and then it should start working. The space telescope is currently more than 1 million km from Earth, and just over 400,000 km from its destination.

(mo)