What do the Webb Space Telescope mirror segments and a tortoise have in common? They both take it slow and steady. In the case of Webb, slow and steady times eighteen.
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An international research team will survey the stars, star clusters, and dust that lie within 19 nearby galaxies.
Often portrayed as destructive monsters that hold light captive, black holes take on a less villainous role in the latest research from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. A black hole at the heart of the dwarf galaxy Henize 2-10 is creating stars rather than gobbling them up. The black hole is apparently contributing to the firestorm of new star formation taking place in the galaxy. The dwarf galaxy lies 30 million light-years away, in the southern constellation Pyxis.
Now that the telescope is fully deployed, engineers started to unlock and move the mirror segments this week in preparation for focusing. This is a slow and deliberate process, and the full release of the mirrors will continue over the next 10 days.
The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) has cataloged more galaxies than all other previous three-dimensional redshift surveys combined, measuring 7.5 million galaxies in only seven months since beginning science operations. The US Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory leads DESI, which is installed at Kitt Peak National Observatory, a program of NSF’s NOIRLab, on the Nicholas U. Mayall 4-meter Telescope.
EK Draconis illuminates an unimagined picture of how superflares may affect interplanetary space through coronal mass ejection
From the spectacular Ariane 5 rocket launch on Christmas day to the deployment of the solar panels, sunshield, and secondary and primary mirrors, Webb has gone through a picture-perfect deployment.
Today the port side of Webb’s mirror was successfully unfolded. After a motor moved the wing into position, it took about 2 hours for the wing to securely latch into place.
Webb’s cameras and spectrographs need to be cold. Really cold. They need to be so cold that engineers created specialized mechanisms to reduce their heat in addition to the shade provided by the large sunshield. One such mechanism is the Aft Deployable Instrument Radiator, or ADIR.
Today’s excitement came directly from the NASA livestream of the Mission Operations Center at Space Telescope Science Institute during the deployment of Webb’s secondary mirror. Webb Program Manager Bill Ochs exclaimed, “We have a telescope!” as the latching process was confirmed, and the secondary mirror was fully deployed.
From an engineering perspective, Webb’s sunshield was one of the most difficult challenges to overcome in building the telescope. Unlike other parts of the telescope, the sunshield layers are very thin and easily damaged. How could the sunshield be safely and efficiently stored, and then deployed without tearing?
The year 2021 ended for the Webb Telescope in a nominal way. “Nominal” is spacecraft lingo for “everything is going just as it should” and that’s great! Both sides of the telescope’s sunshield’s booms (arms) were pulled out without any problems.
Director, Rubin Observatory Construction Željko Ivezić received undergraduate degrees in mechanical engineering and physics from the University of Zagreb, Croatia, in 1990 and 1991, and his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Kentucky in 1995. He worked on the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) at Princeton University and then was a Professor at the University of […]
Today saw the beginning of one of the most difficult Webb deployments so far, the sunshield rollout. The Webb telescope observes in ultraviolet light and needs to be kept very cold in order to collect the faint light from distant galaxies. A key component to keep the telescope cold is Webb’s sunshield. This large structure, the size of a tennis court, is made up of 5 layers of very thin material.
The Webb team at the Mission Operations Center (MOC) at Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Maryland started the day with an early morning deployment. The Aft Momentum Flap was successfully lowered into its final position. The deployment was finished at 9:00 am EST.
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