Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Space
  3. News

Webb telescope team about to face crucial mirror deployment

By

NASA confirmed on Wednesday that the secondary mirror on the James Webb Space Telescope has been successfully deployed.

It means the team can now focus on one of the most crucial steps in the telescope’s deployment process — the opening up of the observatory’s mirror, which at 21.4 feet across is the largest such device ever sent to space.

Recommended Videos

The mirror is crucial to the mission’s success as it will be used to pick up light from distant galaxies and hopefully enable scientists to take our understanding of the universe to a whole new level.

Related

✅ Secondary mirror deployed! But there's little time to pause and reflect.

Teams will ensure @NASAWebb's tripod structure is latched before beginning its final major milestone this week: full deployment of the space telescope's honeycomb-shaped primary mirror. pic.twitter.com/dT9kv5oDqS

— NASA Webb Telescope (@NASAWebb) January 5, 2022

Like the observatory’s sunshield, the mirror is so large that it had to be folded into a compact shape to fit inside the Ariane 5’s rocket fairing for the December 25 launch.

The sunshield has already successfully unfurled, while the deployment of the primary mirror is set to begin on Friday in a process that will likely finish the following day.

The procedure involves motors pushing into place a left wing and a right wing, each one holding three of the mirror’s 18 segments.

Once fully aligned, the wings will latch onto the main part of the mirror to keep them firmly in place.

A diagram of the James Webb Space Telescope.
NASA

NASA said the Webb mission needed a huge mirror to allow scientists to peer back through time to when galaxies were in their infancy.

“Webb will do this by observing galaxies that are very distant, at over 13 billion light-years away from us,” the space agency explains on its website. “To see such far-off and faint objects, Webb needs a large mirror. A telescope’s sensitivity, or how much detail it can see, is directly related to the size of the mirror area that collects light from the objects being observed. A larger area collects more light, just like a larger bucket collects more water in a rain shower than a small one.”

The James Webb Space Telescope is currently about 70% of the way to its destination orbit about a million miles from Earth.

Assuming the primary mirror deployment proceeds without a hitch, the $10 billion observatory will begin exploring the universe and beaming back data around the middle of this year.

Editors’ Recommendations

Topics
Trevor Mogg
Trevor Mogg
Contributing Editor
Not so many moons ago, Trevor moved from one tea-loving island nation that drives on the left (Britain) to another (Japan)…
Zoom into stunning James Webb image to see a galaxy formed 13.4 billion years ago
A section of a James Webb image showing a small part of the Extended Groth Strip, located between the Ursa Major and Boötes constellations.

One of the amazing things about the James Webb Space Telescope is the level of detail it is able to capture of very distant objects -- but it can be hard to picture what that means when the distances being considered are so large. Now, a new visualization gives a feel of just how detailed the data from the telescope is, by showing how it's possible to start with a stunning view of thousands of galaxies and zoom closer and closer in until you reach just one.

CEERS: Flight to Maisie's Galaxy

Read more
One galaxy, two views: see a comparison of images from Hubble and Webb
The peculiar galaxy NGC 3256 takes centre stage in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. This distorted galaxy is the wreckage of a head-on collision between two spiral galaxies which likely occurred 500 million years ago, and it is studded with clumps of young stars which were formed as gas and dust from the two galaxies collided.

It might not seem obvious why astronomers need multiple different powerful space telescopes. Surely a more powerful telescope is better than a less powerful one? So why are there multiple different telescopes in orbit, either around Earth or around the sun?

The answer is to do with two main factors. One is the telescope's field of view, meaning how much of the sky it looks at. Some telescopes are useful for looking at large areas of the sky in less detail, working as survey telescopes to identify objects for further research or to look at the universe on a large scale -- like the recently launched Euclid mission. While others, like the Hubble Space Telescope, look at small areas of the sky in great detail, which is useful for studying particular objects.

Read more
James Webb spots the most distant active supermassive black hole ever discovered
Crop of Webb's CEERS Survey image.

As well as observing specific objects like distant galaxies and planets here in our solar system, the James Webb Space Telescope is also being used to perform wide-scale surveys of parts of the sky. These surveys observe large chunks of the sky to identify important targets like very distant, very early galaxies, as well as observe intriguing objects like black holes. And one such survey has recently identified the most distant active supermassive black hole seen so far.

While a typical black hole might have a mass up to around 10 times that of the sun, supermassive black holes are much more massive, with a mass that can be millions or even billions of times the mass of the sun. These monsters are found at the heart of galaxies and are thought to play important roles in the formation and merging of galaxies.

Read more