Engineers are using gyroscopes and fine-grain precision to align all 18 mirrors and get the telescope running.
“The entire Webb team is ecstatic at how well the first steps of taking images and aligning the telescope are proceeding. We were so happy to see that light makes its way into NIRCam,” Marcia Rieke, principal investigator for the instrument, said in aNASA chose this star, known by the catchy name HD 84406, because of its isolated brightness. This makes it a good test case as the Webb team aligns each of the 18 hexagonal mirror segments.
Each dot within the mosaic is labeled by the corresponding primary mirror segment that captured it. These initial results closely match expectations and simulationsBut even after all this finetuning to get the telescope up and running, the engineers will need to constantly tweak the mirrors’ positions to make sure the images reflect full accuracy and detail. “It’s designed to be adjusted any time that it needs to be,” Hernandez said last month.
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