The James Webb Space Telescope hit another milestone this week, and NASA announced that 18 hexagonal mirror clips of the $10 billion observatory and its entire secondary mirror have been published.
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson
“Only from the Webb team: All 18 primary mirror clips and secondary mirror clips have now been fully deployed,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson wrote in a tweet on Wednesday. , which is a point L2″
The mirror deployment process began last week, with the team moving parts individually from their launch sites.
In an update to the blog, Erin Wolfe, Web program manager, wrote that the actuators made more than a million decisions this week, and were controlled by 20 cooled electronics boxes on the telescope.
She said: “The mirror deployment team gradually moved all 132 actuators located at the back of the primary mirror and secondary mirror sections. These actuators removed the mirrors from the launch restraints and gave each part enough room to later adjust in other directions to the optical starting position for the next wavefront alignment.”
18 bending actuators circuits have also been moved from the launch site.
James Webb Space Telescope
“Even against the strength of beryllium, which is six times that of steel, these bending actuators individually shape the curvature of each mirror segment to set the initial equivalent shape of the primary mirror,” said Wolf.
Next, Wolf said that the team will move the mirrors in the micron and nanometer ranges to reach the final optical positions of the aligned telescope, and the alignment process will take approximately three months.
The telescope, which has been in space for nearly a month and is a joint project with the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency, must also complete a burn path that will put the observatory into orbit around a spot called Earth-Sun Lagrangian Point 2, or L2.
Source: Fox News