The United States Space Agency, NASA, has reported that the deployment of the web telescope has concluded once the extension of the second mirror module as a bee honeycomb is finished.
“The last wing is now deployed,” the NASA reported through Twitter, with which a process started with the launch of the telescope to space two weeks ago.
From now on there are five months of alignment and calibration of the telescope instruments before it begins to transmit the first readings and images.
The Webb Space Telescope was released on December 25 from the European Space Port of Kourou, in French Guiana, aboard a Rocket Ariane 5.
It is a joint mission of NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Canadian Space Agency to put in space the largest observatory out of Earth ever built, with a launch mass of 6.2 tonnes.
Webb is expected to solve mysteries in our solar system, see more in depth distant worlds around other stars and explore the mysterious structures and origins of our universe and our place in it.
The telescope will observe the infrared light with an unprecedented sensitivity, which will allow you to look back over time about 13,500 million years to see the first galaxies after the Big Bang.
Among its main technical characteristics, it is necessary to highlight the primary mirror – composed of 18 hexagonal segments that combined a mirror with a diameter of 6.5 meters, compared to 2.4 meters from Hubble -, the parasol and four scientific instruments
between cameras and spectographs.
The telescope will be deployed in the space near the Lagrangian land-Sol L2 point, 1.5 million kilometers from the Earth.
Its destination is that because, balanced between the gravitational forces of the Sun and the Earth will maintain the same orientation with respect to both, and the calibration and shielding are simpler.
Webb will be protected by a large parasol made of five kapton leaves covered with aluminum and silicone that will keep the mirror and four main scientific instruments at temperatures close to absolute zero.
Unlike Hubble, which observes near the nearby, visible and infrared ultraviolet spectra, Webb will observe in the visible long wavelength light (orange to red) through the middle infrared range, which gives you a hundred times more sensitivity
.
This will allow a wide range of research through many subfields of astronomy, which observes and studied the first stars, from the era of reaction, formation of the first galaxies, take photographs of molecular clouds, stellar training groups, as well as objects
With high displacement towards red too old and distant so that they could be observed by Hubble and other previous telescopes.
Under development since 1996, it was initially referred to as Next Generation Space Telescope or NGST, until 2002 it was called James E. Webb, in honor of the NASA administrator between 1961 and 1968. The project, whose purpose is to give relief to
Hubble and Spitzer spatial telescopes have suffered five years after launching and its final cost round 10,000 million dollars.
