CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — NASA’s new area telescope has captured its first starlight and even taken a selfie of its big, gold mirror.
All 18 segments of the first mirror on the James Webb House Telescope appear to be working correctly 1 1/2 months into the mission, officers mentioned Friday.
The telescope’s first goal was a brilliant star 258 light-years away within the constellation Ursa Main.
“That was only a actual wow second,” mentioned Marshall Perrin of the House Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore.
Over the following few months, the hexagonal mirror segments — every the scale of a espresso desk — can be aligned and centered as one, permitting science observations to start by the tip of June.
The $10 billion infrared observatory — thought-about the successor to the getting old Hubble House Telescope — will search mild from the primary stars and galaxies that shaped within the universe almost 14 billion years in the past. It would additionally look at the atmospheres of alien worlds for any attainable indicators of life.
NASA didn’t detect the crippling flaw in Hubble’s mirror till after its 1990 launch; greater than three years handed earlier than spacewalking astronauts had been in a position to appropriate the telescope’s blurry imaginative and prescient.
Whereas every thing is wanting good to date with Webb, engineers ought to be capable to rule out any main mirror flaws by subsequent month, Feinberg mentioned.
Webb’s 21-foot (6.5-meter), gold-plated mirror is the most important ever launched into area. An infrared digicam on the telescope snapped an image of the mirror as one section gazed upon the focused star.
“Just about the response was ‘Holy Cow!’,” Feinberg mentioned.
NASA launched the selfie, together with a mosaic of starlight from every of the mirror segments. The 18 factors of starlight resemble brilliant fireflies flitting in opposition to a black evening sky.
After 20 years with the venture, “it’s simply unbelievably satisfying” to see every thing working so nicely to date, mentioned the College of Arizona’s Marcia Rieke, principal scientist for the infrared digicam.
Webb blasted off from South America in December and reached its designated perch 1 million miles (1.6 million kilometers) away final month.
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