On March 16, local time, NASA announced that the James Webb Space Telescope completed the mirror calibration on March 11, and the NASA Weber telescope team predicted that the optical performance of the Webb telescope will meet or exceed the scientific goals set. Weber's light path has no serious problems and no measurable contamination or blockages. The observatory was able to successfully collect light from distant objects and transmit it to the instrument.
Launched last December and developed by NASA, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency, the Weber Telescope will help solve the mysteries of the solar system, observe distant worlds around other stars, and explore the mysterious structure and origin of the universe, as well as our place in it.
Weber and Hubble's main mirror contrast
It was the first telescope in space to use a segmented main mirror design. The oddly shaped telescope consists of 18 unfurable, gold-plated hexagonal lenses coated with 48.25 grams of gold. The main mirror is 6.5 meters in diameter, which is 2.7 times that of the Hubble Space Telescope, which is "advanced" in its 30s. It had to be folded up when it was launched, then unfolded in space, and each lens had to be adjusted.
The Webb telescope images the 2MASS J17554042+6551277 star.
During the specular calibration phase, each lens section is adjusted to use only the telescope's near-infrared camera (NIRCam) to generate a unified image of the same star. After completing the calibration, the team fully aligned the Webb telescope's near-infrared camera at the observatory mirror, and the telescope imaged the star called 2MASS J17554042+6551277 to evaluate the calibration. The goal of the graph is to focus on the middle bright star in order to evaluate the calibration. But Weber's optical system and near-infrared cameras are so sensitive that galaxies and stars can be seen in the background.
In the webb telescope's new "selfie" photo, 18 mirror parts are collecting light from the same star at the same time.
Over the next six weeks, the team will perform the remaining calibration steps to further tune the NIR spectrometer, mid-infrared instrument, NIR imaging, and seamless spectrometer. After that, the final calibration steps of the Weber telescope begin, and the team will adjust for any remaining fine positioning errors on the mirror section.
NASA said it is expected to complete all the work on the elemental calibration of the optical telescope in early May, followed by about two months of scientific instrument preparation, and the first full-resolution images and scientific data of the Webb telescope will be released in the summer.