It's been 19 days since the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope, a landmark space observation instrument in human history, so where has the nearly $10 billion space telescope, which scientists have pinned high hopes on, traveled to? What is its main job or main task at the moment?
To be precise: One of the tasks currently underway with the James Webb Space Telescope is to align the main mirror, which aims to align the telescope's 18 individual mirrors into a single plane so that the target can be observed more accurately and clearly. According to the plan of NASA's scientific team, it will take about 3 months to align all 18 independent mirrors into one observation plane!
Many people may wonder: isn't it better to calibrate several mirrors in line, how can it take so long?
In fact, as NASA's James Webb Space Telescope project team envisions, to ensure that nothing goes wrong with the expensive $10 billion device, every step of the telescope deployment phase must be very careful, essentially requiring foolproof.
Specifically, to align the telescope's 18 individual mirrors to a normally working plane, scientists need to control a total of up to 126 extremely sophisticated motors, in addition, there are 6 independent motors on the secondary mirror, that is, in order to align this mirror, 132 mobile devices need to be controlled.
In addition, another decisive factor in the fact that it takes 3 months to align the mirror surface is that these extremely sophisticated motors are working with nanometer-level accuracy, and the amplitude of each movement is not more than 10 nanometers (this amplitude is about one-tenth of the diameter of human hair). Each mirror surface needs to be moved by 12.5 mm in order to move away from the device that holds them, and in order to reduce heat generation, each motor can only perform a movement command once a day, and the movement range does not exceed 1 mm, so it takes about 10 days just to remove the 18 mirrors from the fixture, and then it can start the real "alignment" action, and the time required to complete it is not less than 3 months.
But for an expensive astronomical observation instrument that took nearly 30 years and cost nearly $10 billion, it's worth spending so much time before actually starting work, after all, in order for the device to work properly, astronomers have waited 30 years, and 3 months is really insignificant in comparison.
As of 11:00 Beijing time on January 14, 2022, the James Webb Space Telescope has flown 1.23 million kilometers away from the earth, and there are still 210,000 kilometers away from the L2 point of the sun and earth, and it is expected that the first observation image of the James Webb Space Telescope will be released sometime this summer, which is the real thing worth our expectation and anxious waiting for.