JWST Commissioning Bingo
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) commissioning is on the final stretch before the telescope can start science observations! With ...
Many Segments are now One Mirror
Today NASA released the first image from Webb with all 18 segments focused and functioning together as a single 6.5-meter ...
Light in the Strangest of Places (if you look at it right)
This week the Webb telescope team kept the excitement going with two main developments. Light from a star made its ...
Day 30: Last Deployment Box Checked Off!
Today Webb concluded a month of incredible achievements, and we checked off the last box on our deployment “To Do ...
Day 25: Slow and Steady Wins in Space
What do the Webb Space Telescope mirror segments and a tortoise have in common? They both take it slow and ...
Day 19: Moving Mirrors
Now that the telescope is fully deployed, engineers started to unlock and move the mirror segments this week in preparation ...
Day 14: Webb’s Deployment is Complete!!
From the spectacular Ariane 5 rocket launch on Christmas day to the deployment of the solar panels, sunshield, and secondary ...
Day 13: Mirror, Mirror – First Wing Unfolds
Today the port side of Webb’s mirror was successfully unfolded. After a motor moved the wing into position, it took ...
Day 12: Cool Telescope Gets a Little Cooler
Webb’s cameras and spectrographs need to be cold. Really cold. They need to be so cold that engineers created specialized ...
Day 11: We have a telescope!
Today’s excitement came directly from the NASA livestream of the Mission Operations Center at Space Telescope Science Institute during the ...
Day 10: Sunshield Deployment Complete!
From an engineering perspective, Webb’s sunshield was one of the most difficult challenges to overcome in building the telescope. Unlike ...
Day 9: A Pause, and then Sunshield Tensioning Begins
The year 2021 ended for the Webb Telescope in a nominal way. “Nominal” is spacecraft lingo for “everything is going ...
