The The James Webb Space Telescope successfully completed the last stage of its deployment this Saturday, along with that of its main mirror., and is already in its final configuration to begin, in just over five months, its exploration of the cosmos, NASA reported.
“The final wing is now deployed,” the United States aerospace agency (NASA) said via Twitter, adding that the team was now working “to secure the wing in place, a process of several hours.”
That main mirror of the telescope is about 6.5 meters in diameter. and because the James Webb was too large to fit into the nose cone of a rocket in its operational lift-off configuration, it was transported with both sides folded.
The first of these two wings was deployed on Friday and the second opened this morning as planned, NASA said, however acknowledging that the deployment was a complex and challenging task.
Webb, the most powerful space telescope ever built and the successor to Hubble, took off in an Ariane 5 rocket from French Guiana on December 25 and is heading to its orbital point, 1.5 million kilometers from Earth.
Its infrared technology allows it to see the first stars and galaxies that formed 13.5 billion years ago, which seeks to give astronomers a new perspective on the earliest times of the Universe, the AFP news agency reported.
“Before we celebrate, we still have work to do,” NASA said in its live updates. “When the final latch is secure, Webb will unfold fully into space,” he said.
Earlier this week, the telescope unfolded its five-layer sunscreen, a 21-meter-long comet-shaped apparatus that acts like an umbrella, whose job is to ensure that Webb’s instruments are kept in the shade so they can detect faint infrared signals from the far reaches of the Universe.
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